Girl Power

by PT Dilloway

  Major Dalton waits for her on the pier. The major grins. “Well, don’t you look pretty?”

  Though she knows it’s vain, she pats her hair and says, “You like it?”

  “It’s nice. Makes you look a little more feminine.”

  “Thanks. Are the others here yet?”

  “Not yet. They should be here soon enough.”

  Right on cue, Allison comes to a stop in front of them. Starla’s nose crinkles as she detects something different about Allison. It takes Starla a few moments to realize it’s the smell of alcohol. It’s potent enough to her keen senses that she has to take a step back.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Allison says. “What’s going on?”

  “I’ll show you when we get inside. Elise should be here in a minute.”

  It’s closer to five minutes when Elise climbs onto the pier. She picks at some seaweed that’s gotten caught in her hair during the trip. There’s a strange smell about her too, not from the seaweed or anything else sea-related. It’s the smell of sex, Starla realizes.

  That explains why Elise says, “What’s so damned important that you had to drag me here?”

  “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  Starla hangs back as the others go through a hatch. She takes a deep breath before she forces herself to go inside. She’s never really felt claustrophobic before, but now she feels like she’s being stuffed into a box—or a coffin. She tells herself there’s nothing to be afraid of; this is just a mission briefing, like countless others she attended when she was still Apex Man.

  They make it to the control room without incident. Major Dalton gestures to one of her techs, who puts an image on the giant screen. Next to her, Elise giggles. “Are you serious?” she asks. “You brought us all this way to watch a Godzilla movie?”

  “It’s not a movie,” Dalton says. She gestures to the metallic, tyrannosaurus-looking head visible above the surface of the water. “That’s Dr. Roboto’s island.”

  “So it’s a Transformer?” Elise says with the same amount of disgust as her first remark.

  “This is serious,” Dalton snaps. “It changed about three hours ago and started to head towards land. We’ve been sending fighters from the nearest carrier group, but they haven’t done any damage to it. I’ve got subs en route, but I doubt they’ll do much better.”

  “What’s the rest of it look like?” Allison asks, leaning towards the screen for a better look.

  “We haven’t been able to see below the water line, but our satellite images from when it was changing suggest it looks about how you’d expect.” An artist’s conception of a giant robotic tyrannosaurus rex comes onto the screen.

  “And you want us to stop it,” Starla says.

  Dalton nods. “It’s going to make landfall in Tokyo within the hour. If it does, we’re looking at massive damage.”

  “Who’s at the controls?”

  Dalton’s cheeks turn red; it’s something Starla doesn’t remember seeing before. “It’s Roboto. He escaped from Gitmo yesterday.”

  “And you didn’t tell us?” Starla says.

  “We’ve been trying to keep it quiet. No need to cause a panic.”

  Elise snorts. “This figures. You guys create a mess and now you expect us to come in and clean it up for you.”

  Starla puts a hand on Elise’s shoulder. “Come on, millions of lives are at stake here.”

  “Because she didn’t tell us he broke out of jail. The bitch still doesn’t trust us.”

  “You’re starting to sound like Rob,” Allison says with a half-smile.

  “Well, as much as I hated the man, sometimes he was right,” Elise says. She gestures to Dalton. “You military jerk-offs are always keeping your stupid little secrets until some criminal starts to run amok and then you call us in to clean it up for you.”

  Starla finds herself nodding in spite of herself. She remembers when they first heard about the Feminazi activating the island. Starla had thought of how she’d wanted to hurl the island into the sun, but the military had rebuffed her requests. That had led to her being turned into a woman. And now millions could die.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” Dalton says. “We screwed it up. Can we focus on the problem at hand?”

  “What do you need us to do?” Starla asks. As much as she agrees with Elise, the major is right that they have to worry about the immediate threat. They can lay the blame later.

  “Basically the idea is to keep it from getting on land. Elise, you try to run interference, see if you can get it to stop. Starla, do what you can to disable it. And Allison, you help get the civilians out of the way.”

  “Give her the easy job,” Elise grumbles.

  “Remember, don’t take this lightly. We all know what happened last time and that wasn’t even with Roboto at the controls. We can expect some heavy resistance this time.”

  “We? What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll be coordinating from the air. Like I said, we have subs en route and some other assets from Okinawa should be hitting the area. Any other questions?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Starla says, though she doesn’t feel that confident. She hopes things go better than they did the last time they went up against Roboto’s island.

  ***

  Though Elise didn’t really buy the story of Dr. Roboto’s island turning into a giant metal dinosaur, she believes it more and more the closer she gets to Tokyo. Marine life of every sort cries out in terror as she passes. Groups of fish, whales, squids, and even sharks streak past as they flee from the shadowy giant.

  She tries to get a coherent picture, but she can’t. All she knows is it’s big and it makes a lot of noise. The sea creatures are too frenzied for her to enlist their help against the monster, not that she knows how they could be helpful. It’s unlikely she’ll find any takers in Tokyo’s harbor either.

  While she swims, she thinks of Erek back on her atoll. She had left Paul there to go to Roboto’s island and had lost him forever; would the same happen to Erek? She doesn’t think she can stand to lose another man she loves. This, she supposes, is why Rob Holloway was always such an aloof jackass. He never had to worry about losing anyone he loved, except maybe that butler of his.

  It’s not fair. Even when she doesn’t have to worry about being the ruler of Pacifica anymore, the moment she falls in love, something has to come along to ruin it. Provided she survives this, she’s going to tell Dalton and her masters they can shove their superhero team. Let Starla and Allison handle things. She’s out once this is over. Then she and Erek can spend the rest of their days on the atoll or in some nice little house down on the ocean floor, far away from all the world’s problems.

  With this thought in mind, she swims even faster. In a few minutes, she sees a massive shape ahead of her. This has to be the monster. It’s easily the size of a ten-story building. A ten-story building with legs. Poseidon protect me, she prays as she glides in closer.

  For the most part the thing does have the shape of a T-Rex, except its mechanical arms are longer, more like those of a human. It has two feet, but at the moment it’s using a propulsion system on its back to move through the water faster than she would have thought possible. Two long slits in the back spew a wake trail that could probably knock Elise back a couple miles if she gets too close.

  At the moment she has other problems to deal with. The monster doesn’t seem to take any notice of her as she swims alongside it. She keeps her eyes sharp for any of those nets like the one that caught her the first time. It was nearly impossible to see and will probably be harder to see with the monster stirring up so much debris from the ocean floor.

  The question now that she’s so close is how she can possibly run interference as Major Dalton wants. By comparison to the monster she’s not even a mosquito; she’s more like an amoeba or some other microscopic creature. There seems no way she can draw its attention, let alone hurt it enough
for it to consider her a threat.

  A few leaves of kelp smack her in the face. As she wipes them off, a crazy idea begins to form. She can’t hurt it, but if she can slow it down a little, then maybe that will be enough for Starla to handle it.

  She summons the royal trident. Then she dives to the ocean floor. With the trident she spears a chunk of rock like it’s a meatball on a plate of spaghetti. Thanks to the low gravity underwater, it’s not too difficult for her to move a piece of rock the size of an SUV. This gets harder as she catches back up to the monster. The wake from its propulsion system is enough to knock her and the rock sideways.

  She’ll have to approach it sideways and try to jam the rock into one of the slits on the back that propel it along. The wake isn’t so bad from this angle, allowing her to get closer. Once she’s almost up against the side of the monster, she pushes the rock towards the slit. The wake tries to push it out, but she uses all her strength to roll it into the slit.

  There’s no explosion or grinding noise or anything like that. The wake does ebb on that side. She swims backwards as the monster lurches starboard. That seemed to do the trick. Maybe if she can find another rock she can repeat the procedure.

  She won’t get the chance. She watches as more slits open into holes. She counts a dozen in all. From each one spews a torpedo. “Oh, shit,” she mutters. Then she swims for her life.

  She dives as quick as she can, hoping to throw the torpedoes off. It works on half of them, leaving her with just six torpedoes left to deal with. They’re gaining on her with each second that passes; another minute and she’ll be a goner.

  Ahead of her is the area of ocean floor from which she cut out the piece of rock. There are more outcroppings of rock there, like a forest of trees. She zigzags through these. Two of the torpedoes explode, spraying chunks of debris in all directions. A few pelt against Elise, but she’s too busy to care.

  With four more on her tail, she decides she has to change things up. She somersaults around to reverse direction. She hopes Roboto doesn’t have someone to manually trigger the torpedoes if she gets close enough.

  As she closes in, she raises the trident. One prong of the trident clips a fin of the torpedo. The weapon plunges towards the floor, where it harmlessly explodes. She repeats this on a second one. With the third she uses the trident like a bat to slap the torpedo away.

  But there’s still one more torpedo. It’s only about ten feet away now. She grips the trident—

  The torpedo’s warhead opens. From it comes a net like the one that ensnared her before. “Not again,” she mumbles before the net shocks her into unconsciousness.

  ***

  Fighting underwater isn’t one of Starla’s strengths. She’d rather fight on the ground or above it. Even space is better than underwater, where her flame breath is useless and she can’t fly. Still, she has to admit Major Dalton is right that they need to head the thing off before it can get into the city to do untold amounts of damage.

  As she closes in, she sees the head of the beast on the surface. It’s not hard to see since it’s made of polished chrome with bright green eyes. Green eyes. Starla is fairly certain what those eyes can do. She’ll have to be careful to avoid the gamma ray beams it almost certainly will try to shoot at her.

  Nevertheless, she decides to try the head first since she can attack it from the air. She swoops down on it, her fire breath at the ready. She lets go a stream at the left eye, hoping to put that out of commission. When the smoke clears, though, she sees no damage at all.

  Looks like she’ll have to get in closer. She zigzags through the air, hoping to fool any targeting systems the thing might have. Nothing fires at her. The monster doesn’t even seem to notice her presence. Just as well, she thinks.

  She rears back and punches it in the left eye. This time she does some damage; the eye shatters against her fist. She pulls her fist back—

  Her hand is stuck! “You’ve got to be kidding,” she says. At first she thinks perhaps her sleeve is caught on something, but when she twists her body to get a better look, she sees a thick, gooey substance like cement has filled in where the eye used to be. She tries to pull her hand back, but it’s like quicksand; the more she struggles, the farther in it goes.

  With her free hand she slaps at the eye to no avail. She screams in frustration, her hand curling into a fist. She brings it down as hard as she can on top of the eye. At last her other hand emerges, though it’s still coated in the cement-like stuff. She smacks this substance against the monster’s head, but it won’t come off.

  Worse yet, the goo is multiplying. She watches as it coils up her arm, coating it up to the elbow and continuing to grow. Whatever it is must be alive.

  There’s only one thing to do. She turns her flame breath on her own arm. She tries to keep it dialed down so only a thin stream of flame leaps out at her arm. The goo halts at last. She sighs with relief. If she’s careful, she can maybe peel it off—

  The monster’s jaws yawn open. From these jaws spew missiles. Each one has a green warhead. They must be some kind of gamma radiation projectiles.

  Starla climbs into the air, but her rate of ascent is slowed by the goo still on her arm. It’s like the stuff is pulling her down. Like a magnet, she thinks. Whatever it is, it must have some kind of magnetic field that pulls it—and her—towards the monster. That was why she couldn’t move her hand.

  She fights against the magnetic pull of the goo on her hand while the missiles continue to close. Her flame breath didn’t do much good against the monster, but maybe it will work on these missiles. She summons a wall of flame that ought to destroy the missiles.

  It works, but it works too well. The missiles explode in mid-air. Weighted down by the magnetic substance on her arm, she’s not able to escape before a cloud of gamma radiation washes over her. The second it reaches her, she starts to drop like a rock towards the ocean.

  She doesn’t hit the water. A net extends from the side of the monster’s head to catch her. Starla struggles against it, but she’s too weak from the gamma radiation. Her attempt to roll off the net is held up by the magnetic goo on her arm that holds her down like a shackle. There’s nothing she can do as the net pulls her into the monster.

  ***

  It’s not much of a surprise to Allison to find the authorities are skeptical of her claim about a giant metal beast coming to stomp Tokyo. Through an interpreter, she explains the message comes not from her but the United States military. That only elicits scoffs and eye rolling.

  “Goddamn it, we have to get these people out of here!” she shouts at them. She wonders fleetingly if they would be more likely to believe her if she were still a man.

  She’s still arguing in vain when a crowd of dock workers runs by, screaming and pointing towards the harbor. She picks up the word “kaiju,” which she knows is the Japanese word for a giant beast. Allison turns to the translator. “Tell them we have to evacuate as many people as we can before it’s too late.”

  The policemen stare at her for a moment before one finally agrees. He gives the word to his people to evacuate the city. Police cars roll away, men with bullhorns shouting for people to get to safety. Air raid sirens begin to bleat.

  Allison isn’t sure what she’s supposed to do now. Then the ground beneath her feet rumbles. There’s a roar so loud it knocks her to her knees. From that position, she watches the creature emerge from the water.

  It’s just like a monster movie as the robot stomps up to the surface. Water streams from its chrome surface as more of it becomes visible. It has the head, torso, and legs of a tyrannosaurus rex, but the tail is shorter and the arms longer. Still, it’s a good approximation of Godzilla.

  She supposes Roboto chose Tokyo for that reason. He always did have a sense of humor like that. But what does he want? He was never interested in destruction for the sake of destruction. There has to be so
me kind of plan at work.

  At the moment, though, they need to stop the creature. She looks around for Starla, but doesn’t see her. On cue, Allison’s watch beeps. Major Dalton’s face is projected in the air. “Allison, I’ve got some bad news. I can’t contact Starla or Elise.”

  “You mean I’m on my own?”

  “I’m afraid so. We’ve got units inbound, but until then it’s up to you.”

  “Just great,” she mutters. Alone against a ten-story metal dinosaur. She isn’t sure what she can do. She can’t punch it or breathe fire on it like Starla. She can’t summon whales to do her bidding either. All she can do is run fast. What good is that?

  The monster roars again and pounds closer. It tears through electrical wires, which fall to the ground to spark and sizzle. One of these lands within a few feet of Allison. Much closer and she might have been electrocuted—

  Of course. If it’s a robot then it must run on electricity. What she needs is an electromagnetic pulse powerful enough to incapacitate the thing. But unless Major Dalton drops a nuke on Tokyo, there’s no way to easily create a big enough pulse.

  Maybe there’s another way. She speeds through the city to find the ingredients for what she needs. In a factory near where the monster is coming ashore, she finds some iron tubing. She rolls these into a pile in the center of the road a couple of miles from the monster. Then she speeds over to a construction site, where she finds enough copper wiring for what she needs. Then she bursts into a store that sells fireworks to clean them out of firecrackers. The hardest part is to find some industrial strength magnets in a laboratory.

  Altogether her craft project’s taken ten minutes so far. Now she has to assemble the pieces to make an EMP device she hopes will be capable of shorting out the monster. Chances are it’ll short out a good portion of the Tokyo area as well, but it’s better than the alternative.

  “What are you doing?” the police translator asks her.

  “Stay back,” she says. She goes to work on wrapping the copper wire around the iron tubes. Then she stuffs the firecrackers and magnets into the tubes. There’s only one thing she’s missing: a match.