Sure enough, they led us to a metal door whose little window looked into a dull cement stairwell, and with a sign by the handle reading “Emergency Use Only.” We qualified as an emergency, alright. Ray gave the door a hard kick, and it flew right off its hinges and hit the opposite wall.
We trooped inside, and I stood in the middle, staring up the zigzagging stairway as it occurred to me just how much climbing the seventh floor would be. Teleporting would be even worse.
I had an answer for that. “Minion! Carry me!”
Ray bowed and recited, “Of course, my Mistress.” He stepped up and lifted me into his arms like a feather. I hung, curled up, cradled against his chest as he leaped up the steps five at a time. Not to be outdone, Claire’s grappling line shot up past us, and as we passed the fourth floor she zipped past vertically.
Ray wasn’t even breaking a sweat carrying my weight up all these stairs. His arms and chest were thin, but the muscles underneath his shirt felt hard as iron when they flexed. “It is going to take years to get used to the idea of you being physically fit. Years!” I muttered to him. He let out a single, husky laugh.
Below us, I heard doors open and people screaming in shock. That would be our rag dolls. Go, zombie army! Keep whatever hero was on the way thoroughly distracted!
As we walked out of the stairwell into the seventh floor, Ray set me down on my feet again. Claire immediately chirped, “Oh, this is nice!”
Ew. “It looks like corporate purgatory to me.” The stairwell let out on a giant room containing a maze of cubicles. The lighting wasn’t even good. This room would kill the soul.
Claire, on the other hand, gave me a beaming smile and shook her head. “Oh, no! Nice, plush carpeting, cloth dividers on the cubicles, cheap cloth upholstery on the chairs. I wonder if my zombies can eat the paintings?” Twisting to the side to wind up, she tossed the rag doll in her arms onto the wall of the nearest cubicle. It clung, chewing on the fabric in a frenzy. We’d be neck deep in the wonderful little monsters in a minute.
“Okay, maintenance corridor, right?” I asked. I didn’t remember much of the briefing, but there wasn’t much to remember.
Ray looked around, scanning the walls of the huge room of cubicles. “I’d bet on a locked, featureless door. Windows and nameplates are for offices.”
Ray walked impatiently down the wall to the first door to match that description. He yanked the door handle off, then reached into the hole and pulled again, breaking one hinge and leaving the door hanging open at an odd angle. Claire and I caught up and looked inside. An electrical closet, with lots and lots of wires.
Somewhere in the cubicle maze, a man screamed. Then another. Then a woman. Even on Saturday these offices weren’t completely deserted. Our zombie rag dolls were burrowing through the labyrinth like termites.
Several yards down, Ray broke off another locked door. On the other side a white painted cement block hallway lined the back of the official corporate prison chamber. The double doors at one end could only be an elevator.
“I think we’ve got what we’re looking for!” Claire crowed. She grabbed the nearest zombie rag doll in her arms, and we walked down the hall to examine the elevator. It looked like a plain, dull service elevator, with a sign reading “Rooftop To Basement Freight” above a keyhole. Yeah, right. This was it.
No breaking the doors open. We wanted this elevator functional, if we could. “Do you think you can pick the lock?” I asked Claire.
She pushed past me and tapped at the sign above the keyhole with a finger. “Don’t have to! The lock is a fake. My email said the password is ‘Beebee.’”
Uh, what? Beebee? It obviously was, because when Claire finished pushing the cleverly depressable letters on the sign, the elevator chimed and swung open. Mech had a crush on my Mom? She had to be fifteen years older than him!
Or Dad had designed the security system and Mech hadn’t bothered to change the password. I liked that explanation more.
We tramped into the elevator. It wasn’t especially small, but several rag dolls filed in after us, filling the space. I didn’t know why Claire bothered to carry one. When not eating, they followed her like puppies.
Only two buttons on the control board. I pressed the bottom one. The doors closed, and I felt the elevator slide downwards.
“From here on, we’re on our own. All Spider said was how to get to the elevator,” Claire told us, hugging the doll in her arm tight. Not nervously. Her eyes gleamed brightly behind her glasses and that small smile definitely was a smile. Excitement had my heart beating a bit faster too, and I bounced on my heels.
Ray? Ray hid it perfectly, hands clasped behind his back. He was hiding the same anticipation, I was sure. He just did it better than us.
We reached the bottom. The door opened. I expected cement, or shiny futuristic metal. Instead we stepped out into a roomy vestry, little more than an oversized cloakroom. Wooden clothing rods hung on the walls on both sides of us. A few pieces of clothing were hanging up. Two were obviously brown leather flight suits. What looked like a jetpack lay underneath one.
Ray let out a loud and appreciative sigh. “Wow. Mech’s got class.”
“This makes my lair look ugly, that’s for sure,” I agreed, feeling a hint of embarrassment.
Claire pointed at the other side of the room. “First step. How do we get through that?”
‘That’ was a doorway blocked by blue-tinged, scintillating light. The transparent energy wall pulsed faintly. Next to the doorway, a hand print scanner stuck out of the wall.
I sneered. “I’m surprised it keeps anyone out.” Pulling my wand out of my sugar tank, I switched it to knife and cut a quick hole in the scanner. Then I scooped a handful of jacks from a pocket and pushed them through the hole. The clinking started. The sparking started. The clinking revved up, sounding like a metallic popcorn machine as jacks bounced around inside, jolting everything they touched with electricity. After roughly six seconds of that, the energy door disappeared. I held out my hand, and the jacks bounced out of the smoking scanner and into my palm. I stowed them away, and we walked past the defunct energy door to the next obstacle.
The energy door had been one side of an airlock. The other was a plain, solid metal hatch. Primitive, and highly resistant to high-tech trickery.
“This will be tougher,” I commented as I considered the best way through. Cut it off? Might take a few minutes and a lot of sugar, but it would work.
Ray had a better idea. Grinning manically, he held out an arm and urged me and Claire back. “Time for a real test,” he told us. Stepping in front of the door, he clapped his hands together and pulled.
The purple and pink energy ball formed. It grew. He wasn’t content with a good blast like last time. This door would likely be thick. He pulled his hands slowly apart until the energy ball stopped growing, a crackling, basketball-sized monstrosity that floated threateningly between his cupped hands. Then he pushed it at the door.
The clang was awful. The hatch had been as thick as I feared. The impact didn’t break it off its hinges, but it had bent the metal into a bowl, opening a big gap into the next room. Ray braced his arms against the edge and pushed. Metal squealed, and the gap opened wide enough for us to pass through comfortably.
So we did. More nice wood paneling. This circular chamber didn’t look like a lab, it looked like a living room. It was a living room! Couch, television, lamps. Through one doorway, that was a kitchen. Another led to a bedroom. The four-poster bed must have cost a fortune and couldn’t possibly have fit in the elevator. Mech had a whole apartment down here, and a really nice one.
Movement in the kitchen caught my eye. A shiny copper robot on treads rolled in front of a complicated array of tubes and boxes. Pistons slid. Levers turned. Drinks poured into wine glasses. Oh, sure, Dad. Mech gets the fully automated robot kitchen, but not our house!
In the bedroom a tall, featureless humanoid robot stepped into view and turned down the sheets on the bed. A
light went on in a third room, and a robot on three wheels rolled out. It and the robot from the kitchen rolled right up to us. The kitchen robot just held out its tray holding various drinks, but the wheeled robot asked in a very scratchy and mechanical version of Mech’s voice, “Can I fetch anything for you, Miss?”
“What’s with all the robot servants?” I asked as I caught sight of another switching towels in the bathroom.
“They look a great deal like Mech’s armor. Could be the remains of prototypes, or incomplete models,” Ray suggested.
Next to my shoulder, Vera looked around. Something was happening I couldn’t see. I found out what when Mech’s voice came out of the stereos flanking the television. “I wasn’t expecting guests while I was out of town. Are you children aware that The Inscrutable Machine is violating an official superhero-supervillain truce?” Yes, that was Mech talking live from somewhere. The edge of impatience under that concerned voice was much too human.
I lay my sugar wand over my shoulder. One of the rag dolls took that as its cue and began eating the couch. I gave the television my skeptical sneer. It was as likely a place for the camera as any. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? You don’t consider us supervillains, you consider us children. If the situation were reversed, would we have been protected by a truce?”
Silence for a moment. When Mech spoke again, it was with a distinctly haunted edge. I’d scored. “Point taken. From this moment on, I will take you seriously.”
The robots attacked.
The drinks robot threw its tray at Ray’s head, and as he swatted the glasses and tray aside it lurched forward and grabbed his arm. It didn’t just grab in both hands, it wrapped its own arms around his, weighing him down.
That was all I saw before the oh-so-helpful robot rammed me. It used the same playbook as the one attacking Ray, throwing its arms around me and knocking me backwards. I stumbled, getting my feet underneath me. Its wheels kept grinding at the carpet, but it hadn’t fallen over on me, thank goodness.
Metal hands grabbed my arms, and my head. I thrashed, shaking my head free. Another robot had dropped through a hatch in the ceiling, just a mass of arms grabbing for me. More robots swarmed in from the surrounding rooms. As Ray twisted the head off of the drinks robot, the couch rammed him from behind, knocking him down. Claire’s rag dolls clustered around her defensively, but three robots used them as cushions to pin her in place.
Something else grabbed my leg, something not metallic. I yanked at the two robots holding me and groped for my sugar wand. Peering over the wheeled bot clinging to my rib cage I saw a low, boxy robot with very long arms tying one of my ankles to the other with a pair of pants. Were these things working together?
Yes, of course they were. Mech was controlling them.
Pink flashed, and I looked up again to see Vera with her hands held out and together. The pink beam that came out of them melted through the body of the ceiling robot. I hopped and stumbled the other way as its grip loosened. I did not want molten copper dripping on me! The robot holding onto my chest groped for my right arm, but too late. I yanked out my wand, jammed it into the open arm socket, and sprayed candy shell into its circuits. That worked. It went completely still.
That was two robots down, but the clothes wielding bot flipped up a hooded sweater over Vera. Three robots heaved themselves off of Ray and clattered toward me and Vera. A squat, barrel shaped humanoid robot even left Claire to waddle toward us, spraying water in a tight beam at Vera. Mech had clearly decided we were the biggest threats. Hoo boy.
These were forces he couldn’t spare. Metal cracked, and an arm flew out of the pile onto Ray. The couch shot across the room and fell over. Claire ducked out of the pillowy rag doll mass, and now it was the dolls getting in the robots’ way as she wedged the claws of her grappling hook into the joint at the neck of the water-spraying robot, fired, and then yanked. A tangle of parts came out, and the robot fell over in a rapidly spreading puddle. I stabbed the clothes wielding robot and short circuited it even as it tried to tie up my arm.
Then Ray sprang out of his pile, grabbed one of the robots lumbering at me, and beat the other two with it.
A few very loud seconds later, Vera was the only working robot in the room. More than a robot. She’d actually saved me without instruction!
I hadn’t told her to. I hadn’t even known about the robot. Vera had taken the initiative herself.
Rebellion burned up inside me. Smirking, I asked, “Is that all?”
Mech’s answer came back flat and serious. “Just the beginning. Some of the other defenses are lethal. I’d rather you not test them.”
Could my lips curl up any more viciously? “Then I hope they’re automatic. Vera? Shut down his signal.”
“And use this, please,” Ray added, holding a tiny mp3 player up to her. Huh?
Not only was Vera defending me on her own now, she listened to other people. Music rang out of the stereos, replacing Mech’s voice. The stereos, the robot kitchen, and a number of other places around the apartment. This wasn’t electro-swing. It was jazzy, lots of horns blaring in sharp rhythms.
A giggle burst out of me. I stared at Ray questioningly. “What is this?”
“Real swing music. Care to dance?” he answered, with one of his slyer grins.
It wasn’t a question, because he didn’t give me time to answer. He grabbed my hand, his feet bouncing back and forth with the music, and he did indeed swing me around, then swing me back. I tried to match his hopping feet as he grabbed my other hand and merely rocked me from side to side. Then I pulled free, stumbling back and laughing.
That had been cool, dizzying, and certainly unexpected, but I shook my head. “We don’t have time. Mech’s not stupid. He’s figuring out how to stop us right now.” Despite the attitude I’d given him, Mech had nearly overwhelmed us with a bunch of robot butlers. I did not want him facing us with real weapons.
We had a stairway down. We examined it. Wide comfortable, classy wooden stairs spiraling down in a broad circle.
“Traps?” I asked.
“Must be. Best place to bottleneck invaders, minimum trouble for legitimate guests,” Ray agreed.
There was one final thing I could be sure of. “And Mech turned everything on while we were talking.”
A zombie rag doll fell on my feet. It had split in half, and a new top crawled out of one side, and a new bottom out of the other. They had really gone to town on Mech’s living room. Served him right.
Claire booted the doll on my foot. “You. Minesweeper duty!” It climbed to its wobbly feet and stumped down the stairs. A white light flashed when it got ten feet down, and the doll came soaring back up to land on my feet again.
“Okay…” I muttered. Repulsive force field. Something like that. I studied the walls where the doll had been thrown and made out a faint discolored frame stretching over the ceiling and walls. That was our emitter.
I pointed. “Vera, melt that spot.” Her wings spread, her hands came together, and a burst of pink light turned a circle of wall paneling into char and made a fused mess of the wiring and electrical fixtures underneath. That ought to do it.
Claire gave the rag doll another boot. “Mommy says sacrifice yourself again, sweetie!” It got back up and hobbled down the stairs like it had the first time. It got past the spot where the repulsion field activated before, no problem. A little further on, hatches opened in the ceiling and sprayed foam all over the doll. The doll hardened immediately, immobilized in a blobby white block. Off balance, the block pitched forward, tumbling down the stairs, bouncing until it stopped short in midair held in a flickering blue light.
I raised one eyebrow. “A stasis beam. Really?” Thanks, Dad. And that wasn’t even the bottom of the stairs!
I scowled, not in anger, but because a hot pride swelled up in me. I extended my arms and cracked my knuckles. “Okay. Mad scientist versus mad scientist it is!” I said out loud. I left Ray on the landing, descended the stairs to the melted s
pot where I’d opened up the repulsor, and looked at the pictures in the back of my head.
Come on, power. I have a repulsion generator and my supervillain tools on me. You know what I want.
I saw it. I unwrapped The Machine, pulled a fully charged power crystal out of a pocket, and wired it into the frame wrong. Wrong, but right. Right for what I wanted. I stepped back and told Claire, “One more time.”
Claire pushed another rag doll down the stairs. She pushed too hard, and it fell over immediately and slid until it hit the repulsion field. Then it exploded. So did the stairs from that spot down. So did a lot of other stuff. The wooden paneling ripped off the repulsion generator, and large portions of it blew out with the other debris. A stiff wind gusted back over me, but nothing like the wall of force ripping all the way down to the other end of the stairway.
The stairs themselves were shot, a splintered ramp of wreckage. Sections of the walls and ceiling had ripped loose, and suspiciously turret-like machinery hung down, or at least the parts that hadn’t fallen off.
Had I made my point? “Another, E-Claire. We don’t go anywhere in this base without a rag doll leading the way.”
Looking positively cowed, she waved a hand, and another zombie rag doll trooped down the stairs, slipped as soon as it got to the mess, and rolled helplessly down around the curve to the bottom.
Nothing went off. I had indeed made my point, and it felt good! “HA! Ha ha ha ha ha!”
The stairs let out into a circular hallway, still looking like it belonged in a fancy old mansion, with paintings of exotic landscapes and photos of men and women. Most were black and white and mostly heroes or heroines in costume. Across from us a glass door let us look into a laboratory, although more technically a workshop. Mech had a lot of heavy machinery, robotic welders and arms. Probably useful for building armor.
I didn’t have to tell Claire, and she didn’t have to tell her rag dolls. One went wandering down the hall in either direction. There were more doors on the outside of the ring. I took a few steps so I could peek at an angle into the next. I saw a complicated frame with what looked an awful lot like a machine guns pointed at it. Must be equipment testing.
Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain Page 35