by Mia Archer
“Well? What’s going on?” I asked.
The orb pulsed a couple of times. I was pretty sure that meant he was upset about something. At the very least he was annoyed.
“There are multiple terrifying things buried in here that should be brought to your attention mistress,” he said. “But considering saving the city and the world currently relies on finding that weapon that can defeat Fialux, I will endeavor to keep this short and sweet, as you say when I start to prattle on and…”
“Like you’re doing right now?” I asked, allowing just a hint of amusement to touch my voice.
I was frustrated that the bag of circuits was taking this long, but I didn’t want to let on. He seemed to be in a delicate state right now, and the last thing I wanted was to have my most reliable sidekick going to pieces when we were going for the game winning point, or however the hell it was sports people phrased that sort of thing.
“Affirmative mistress,” CORVAC said. “We will have to have a conversation about some of the things I have found at some point, but for the moment I have found the gun’s location.”
“Excellent,” I said. “I know you didn’t work her for long, but there are always going to be horrifying things that shouldn’t exist lurking around the Applied Sciences Department. The mark of someone who’s going to have a good career in villainy is being able to ignore all the shit all your peers are doing and get to work, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do right now.”
“Affirmative, mistress,” CORVAC said, though he sounded unsure of himself.
The lights went out around us, replaced by a dull red glow. They pulsed in time with something, and I couldn’t shake the unpleasant feeling the thing they were pulsing in time with was a countdown timer of some sort.
“Tell me something good about that, CORVAC,” I said.
“It would appear that the aliens have breached the Applied Sciences Department and are now working their way through the upper levels,” CORVAC said. “I only caught a glimpse of them streaming through various holes they blasted in the side before I was kicked out of the system.”
I frowned. I didn’t like the sound of that. Kicked out of the system meant there were still very active countermeasures in there working to keep us out of the computer systems. Something working to keep us out of the systems meant there were probably more surprises in store from Dr. Lana, up to and including the revelation that she wasn’t as dead as I thought she was.
Not that I ever assumed an enemy was dead. Even if I saw the body disintegrating right in front of me. Or having its head blown off right in front of me, as it were.
“We’ll worry about that in a bit,” I said. “We have the location of that weapon, and it’ll take them a little while to get through the security stuff up top and figure out how to get down here to the sublevels so…”
Something stopped me. A rumbling off in the distance. An earthquake that wasn’t an earthquake. An earthquake that was quite familiar to me because I’d heard and felt the same thing not all that long ago in my own lab when Fialux descended down from on high and drilled into the place to rescue Sabine and fuck my shit up.
“Shit,” I said. “I think our timetable just got moved up. We need to get that gun fast.”
24
Dodging
“This is seriously not good,” Nancy said.
“Trust me,” I said. “You either learn to ignore it, you go crazy from the constant tension, or you get killed and you don’t have to worry about that constant tension anymore.”
“Is that supposed to be comforting or something?” Nancy asked.
“It’s about all the comfort you’re going to get from me,” I said. “Now come on. We have to get a move on if we’re going to get to that thing before Fialux does.”
“At least we know the location. Fialux will have to figure it out on her own,” Technomancer said.
A massive rumble moved through the place. It was a distant rumble, at least. I looked at a map on my heads up display and CORVAC projected where he thought she was going based on seismometers set up through the city and the best notion we had of a map of the Applied Sciences Department sublevels.
Which was incomplete, of course, and based on fragmentary records he was able to get when hacking the place. I was well aware that at any moment we could find ourselves stepping in it, quite literally, if we weren’t careful.
“She’s far from us now,” I said. “But that random destruction thing she’s doing right now isn’t good. She could randomly fly our way any moment now.”
“Thanks for more comforting thoughts,” Nancy said with a roll of her eyes.
“I try,” I said with a wink.
More rumbling, but of a different tenor than the stuff that happened when Fialux was doing her impression of a bull in a China shop. That would be the aliens up above probably doing something to try and drill into the place.
“What’s that?” Nancy asked.
“Focus,” I said. “There’s an armory level immediately below us, and then from there we should be getting close to the target.”
“Remind me again why we can’t just do that teleporting thing you did to get to Dr. Lana and kill her again?” Nancy said.
I sighed. “Do you want to rematerialize in a spot where there are a bunch of guns pointed at you ready to end you the moment your ass gets descrambled? Because there’s still a lot of shit keeping watch on this place that would love nothing more than to kill our asses, and going in blind is inviting that stuff to take a potshot at us. I’ll likely survive that, but you won’t. Not to mention if I leave you behind you might run into the same problem.”
Basically bringing a bunch of normals along was starting to be a liability, for all that I still very much needed Technomancer for the next step of the plan. I couldn’t teleport them with me without risking killing them, and I didn’t want to leave them behind for long unless I had a good reason, like tracking down Dr. Lana, because I was running the same risk of them getting killed.
“Right,” Nancy said. “Not getting shot at would be nice.”
“I thought you’d agree with me,” I said. “I really don’t like getting shot at either, and I have ways of protecting my ass.”
“The elevator is up ahead mistress,” CORVAC said.
“You’re sure there are no surprises waiting for us on the other side of that elevator door?” I asked.
“There is nothing that I can find through the access I have to Dr. Lana’s systems currently,” CORVAC said. “Which is not to say there is not anything going on there, but simply that I cannot find anything.”
“Great,” I said, rolling my eyes.
More rumbling in the distance. That time she came a lot closer to us than I was comfortable with, but then again even having Fialux tearing around in the same fucking city was too close for comfort when she was on a tear that involved trying to kill yours truly.
“CORVAC, do you have any access to some of the countermeasures Dr. Lana was trying to use on us?” I asked.
“Affirmative, mistress,” he said. “Though I do not see how something like that would hurt Fialux. As we have established many times before, she does seem to be quite invulnerable.”
“That might be the case,” I said. “But let’s not make this any easier on her than we absolutely have to. Fire on her invulnerable ass and see if that distracts her. She’s going a little crazy right now, and shooting at her while she’s going crazy might be just the ticket.”
“Affirmative, mistress,” CORVAC said.
We hit the elevator and I nodded to Technomancer. It’s not that I didn’t trust CORVAC or his assessment of whether or not this elevator was going to try and kill us. It’s just that if I had someone here who could provide a second opinion while also maybe convincing any countermeasures that might be working independently of the systems CORVAC took over to not kill us then I was going to play that card.
Technomancer smiled her usual slightly off smile. The sort of smil
e that said she didn’t quite realize she was in a life or death fight for the future of the world. That or she was so disconnected from the real world because of all the time she spent with technology that she didn’t care that she was in a life or death fight for the future of the world.
I could understand that to a point. I was willing to admit I was more comfortable with technology than I was interacting with people. There were times when it felt like interacting with people drained me, and there were times when I missed a little bit of the old human contact.
The point is I could understand why a tech empath would prefer that technology. It made more sense than living creatures. The current situation we found ourselves in was proof enough of that.
She held her hands out in front of her doing her Spock impression.
“Looks like we’re okay,” Technomancer said. “The elevator is going to be nice and take us right where we need to go.”
“You sure about that?” I asked.
She shrugged, again as though she didn’t really care that being wrong could result in the security systems in this place using that elevator to pancake us against the bottom of the elevator shaft.
“Can anyone ever be sure about anything?” she asked. “The elevator said it would take us where we need to go, and I believe it.”
“Wonderful,” I said. “We’re trusting an elevator AI. That has to be the single worst idea I’ve ever heard of.”
The real bitch was I could imagine a dark future where elevators with artificial intelligence became a regular thing rather than an annoyance I only ran into when I was in the Applied Sciences department.
“Come on,” I said, stepping into the thing and wincing as I waited for disintegrator rays or something equally nasty to pop out of the ceiling and fire on us.
I was pretty sure my shields could take it, but there were my companions to think about.
The door closed and we moved down. At a controlled pace, which surprised me. I half expected the thing to let gravity take over and kill us since I couldn’t get over the sure feeling that Dr. Lana was still out there somewhere plotting my demise.
The door opened on an armory that would’ve looked impressive if it weren’t for the pesky little fact that everything I saw on display in that armory looked like something that’d been cribbed from one of my designs.
“Damn,” Nancy breathed. “This woman had a lot of toys.”
“It’s not that impressive,” I groused.
“Are you serious?” she asked, picking up a pulse rifle based off of a design I’d created a few years ago. That must’ve been a design she got from CORVAC when he briefly turned coat awhile back, because I sure as hell hadn’t invented that thing while I was still working in the Applied Sciences building.
“She stole that from me,” I said. “Point to any design in this place and she stole it from someone else. You should’ve seen the collection of original works I had back before Fialux came in and busted up my lab.”
I sighed as I thought of that collection. It’d been a sight to behold, and it’d all been reduced to radioactive dust by an explosion that was a combination of a super science industrial accident and a last ditch effort to keep Fialux from discovering more of my secrets.
At least that was the version of events I was telling myself now. It seemed a lot nicer than the truth, which was that I was stupid enough to allow someone with an alien worm homing beacon into my lab which drew Fialux straight to me and caused that industrial accident in the first place.
“Why Night Terror,” Nancy said, a twinkle in her eyes. “You sound like you’re almost jealous that I’m impressed by Dr. Lana’s guns.”
“It’s not like that!” I said. “I’m just sick of that bitch taking credit for stuff I invented fair and square!”
“Fair and square?” Technomancer asked, running her hand along the pulse rifle. “This looks like something from Aliens that has been modified just a little to actually work. And you’re claiming you invented the design?”
I blushed and looked away.
“I’m not saying I invented the design. I’m the one that turned it into a working weapon though. She stole that from me.”
“Right,” Technomancer said, a thin smile on her face that said she was very amused by the whole situation.
That wasn’t a fair comparison though. Sure maybe I’d taken some design cues from classic science fiction. What self-respecting villain or hero hadn’t taken a little bit of a design cue from classic science fiction? It was only fair considering how often science fiction borrowed liberally from our exploits, after all.
Whatever. I had a gun to get. I wasn’t here to look at all the many wonderful ways Dr. Lana had ripped me off. No, I needed to get a look at the one thing she’d invented on her own.
The anti-Fialux gun. That’s what I was calling it in my head now. And I was pretty sure I saw it on a pedestal on the other side of the massive armory.
“CORVAC, would you be a dear and run a scan on that gun? I want to make sure we have a shot of its innards in case something happens to it. I’m done putting all my eggs in one basket. And send a copy to all your remote backups so we don’t lose it if the new lab suffers another catastrophic existence failure.”
“Affirmative, mistress,” he said. “Working on that now.”
I ignored all the other weapons and floated over to the anti-Fialux gun. It looked like the one Dr. Lana used that first fateful night when I’d saved Fialux rather than letting another villain get the credit for taking her out.
I reached out and ran my hand along the weapon. I felt a mixture of wonder and fury as I stared at it. Wonder that something like this could exist. That I finally had my hands on the solution to my most immediate problems, even if it was the sort of thing that was probably going to create a whole new set of problems if I used it.
And of course there was fury that I would ever have to use something like this. Fury at Dr. Lana for tossing Fialux through that portal. Fury at Sabine for twisting Fialux while she was on that strange world.
Fury at myself for letting any of it happen in the first place. That was the fury that stung the most.
Whatever. I had work to do now. The steady rumbling told me Fialux was still out there doing her thing, and that meant we didn’t have long before she was going to stumble across us and try to put a stop to what we were doing here.
I figured it’d be a really fucking good idea to have a weapon ready that could take her out when that happened.
“Technomancer,” I said. “Could you be a dear and get over here? We don’t have long, and I need you to tell me how this damned thing works.”
25
Secret Weapon
“This thing is interesting,” Technomancer said. “It doesn’t look like any sort of technology I’ve ever seen before.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “It looks like someone took the old Super Scope from the Super Nintendo and put a bunch of anti-Fialux weapons in the thing.”
“Well yes,” Technomancer said. “I suppose it is pretty clear where Dr. Lana took her design cues for the thing, but it’s the stuff inside that I’m talking about. Not the cheap discolored plastic on the outside.”
“What does that mean?” I asked. “Can you figure out what makes this thing tick or not?”
Terror seized me. What if we’d done all this, we’d come this far, and we weren’t going to figure out what made the thing work? I didn’t want to have only one of these things around, damn it.
“I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to do anything with this without some way of reading the alien technology that’s inside the damn thing,” Technomancer said.
“Are you fucking kidding me? I looked at the inside of one of those things the last time I captured one and there wasn’t anything about alien technology in the son of a bitch,” I said.
“Yeah, well what I’m seeing here is alien technology,” Technomancer said. “And it’s going to take some getting used t
o the alien stuff before I figure out what to do with it.”
I threw my head to the sky and let out a scream. It was primal. It went beyond the usual frustration I felt when I was getting fucked over by circumstance. This was a “fuck you” to the universe that’d been building inside me for awhile now.
When I was done and turned to look at everyone around me it was clear dialed the theatrics up a little too much for comfort. They were all looking at me like I was a crazy woman, and I didn’t give a fuck.
“I can’t believe that I’m going to get fucked over. I’ve done everything right. I learned the value of friendship and working with people. I came here and fought down my old enemy. I’ve done everything I’m supposed to in order to make the narrative work in my favor and now I’m going to get fucked over at the last moment? That’s not how this is supposed to work!”
“Um, Night Terror?” Nancy asked.
“What?” I snapped.
“Do you seriously think your life is supposed to work like the narrative in some cheesy movie?”
“That’s how it always works!” I said. “That’s how everything works in the villainy business. Things happen when it’s narratively appropriate, and if you’re genre savvy enough you can get that genre to bend to your will and use that against your enemies!”
Nancy sighed and shook her head.
“But that’s not how the world works. This is the real world, and sometimes bad things happen for no reason in the real world,” Nancy said.
Clapping from behind me drew my attention back to where Technomancer was standing with the anti-Fialux weapon. Of course there was Dr. Lana standing there in a holographic projection with a big old gloating smile on her face that said she was having a grand old time watching me getting fucked over.
At least that was one comforting thing out of all this screwed up mess. Seeing her alive was proof that the rules did still sort of work the way they were supposed to. Even if they were rules that were screwing me over at the moment by allowing my biggest enemy to continually come back from the dead.