by Mia Archer
I’m talking trouble for the people who cut me off. Not trouble for me. Because cutting off communications meant there wasn’t a chance I could stop Selena when she decided to become Fialux and come down here to bust some heads.
Fuck.
“What happened?” I asked.
The guy was smashing his thumb into the control panel over and over. Hitting the same button he’d hit back when he started the whole red alert thing. The only problem was it wasn’t doing jack or shit this time around.
“What the fuck is wrong with this thing?” he growled, then he turned on me. “What the fuck did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything,” I said, a thin smile spreading across my face. “After all, I’m just a freshman here for my first class.”
"You need to shut up," he hissed. “I’m not going down because you’re trying to get in here. They’re going to catch you and you’ll be in deep shit.”
"But why," I pressed. "I mean you’d think if something bad was going to happen by now it…"
There was a thunk as the elevator finally reached the bottom of whatever shaft it was moving down. The earpiece hidden in my ear screeched and I yanked it out with a yell. The screech was loud enough that I could still hear it as I tossed it to the floor.
The guy saw it. Clearly he knew what was what now. Not that I was all that worried now. Clearly this guy knew something was up. That he’d stepped in it, and the shit he was in was deep.
Also deep? Whatever hole we’d sank into. That elevator ride was way too long even accounting for things running slower for a security sweep.
The complex under the Applied Sciences Department was big, but it wasn't all that deep. At least it hadn’t been back when I was running around the place.
Which meant either things had changed since the last time I was here or they really were suspicious. It probably didn’t help that this asshole pushed the panic button, even if it did turn off. Maybe it turned off because they realized they had someone in here.
Either way there was a hiss at the doors and I figured it was about to go down.
“Shit,” the guy said. “You’re going to pay for this. I’m not going down because you…”
He stopped as the elevator doors slid open with a quiet hiss revealing none other than Dr. Lana.
Obviously whatever security she was running in this joint was better than I’d given her credit for. It was clear the dude sharing the elevator with me wasn’t expecting her from the way he jumped and flattened himself against the back wall.
As though that would do him a damn bit of good.
She raised her hand revealing a crude approximation of the wrist blaster I carried most of the time, but not now since I was trying to be inconspicuous.
Damn. Caught. I had to get cocky and overconfident.
“Night Terror,” she said. “I thought I might see you again after that ill-advised break in attempt last week.”
I ground my teeth together. I was not going to let her know just how much that line pissed me off. Just how much it pissed me off that she’d gotten the better of me in that fight.
Sure she hadn’t defeated me, but she had kept me from the goal.
“Wait. Night Terror? I was hitting on fucking Night Terror? What the fuck is going on here?”
6
Trap
“What’s going on here is no longer your concern,” Dr. Lana said.
She squeezed her hand. I rolled my eyes. Really? She was still operating an old model that required her to actually use her hands to activate the blaster?
That was the super villain equivalent of using a baby toy.
She might be using the super villain equivalent of a baby toy control scheme, but it worked well enough to send a beam shooting out. It made contact with the jerk who’d been so giving of his time and information and his color seemed to reverse before he was reduced to his constituent atomic parts.
I waved a hand in front of my face even though I knew it was ridiculous. I couldn't shake the feeling that I was breathing nerd dust.
I guess that guy had been totally wrong when he said I was going down for this and he was going to be safe. Though from the terrified way he reacted when he realized he’d aided and abetted an enemy of Dr. Lana’s I figured maybe on some level he knew that all along.
I’d say poor bastard, but he had annoyed me. Come on. I might be doing the whole bleeding heart hero thing for Selena, but in my heart of hearts I was still totally a villain.
"And that, my dear Night Terror, is why we don't give away any information about this complex or how to get access to restricted areas we are not supposed to have access to in the first place!"
“Y’know that might work a lot better if you told the people why they were being vaporized before you vaporized them,” I said. “Or, better yet, if you have someone around to see why the person’s getting vaporized so news gets out that they don’t want to fuck around if they don’t want to get vaporized.”
“Excuse me?” she said.
“I mean it might be an even better idea to not kill people at all. Overall it’s not a good management strategy. Look what happened to Darth Vader’s org chart when he started lobbing people off at the top. Doesn’t work.”
“Did… did you just compare my management style to Darth Vader?” she asked.
“Well yeah, but he had a sense of style and actually struck fear into the hearts of his enemies,” I said. “You don’t.”
Ooh. That sick burn was almost worse than anything I could’ve hit her with from my arsenal of many dangerous and destructive toys. From the way her expression tightened and her mouth puckered up so it looked like the back end of a cat trying to get your attention she knew it.
My only regret was communications had been cut off so Selena didn’t get to hear that one. She always appreciated a good villain taunting. I should know since I was on the business end of some of her super powered verbal beatdowns while she was in the middle of giving me a more physical beatdown.
Dr. Lana crossed her arms under her breasts. A movement that was slightly distracting. She might be a crazy bitch, but as was the case with so many crazy bitches she was also attractive enough to draw attention.
Not that I would ever consider going to crazy town with her. Not in a million years.
I knew it. I had a time machine. I’d looked a million years into the future once and there was no sign of us ruling the planet together. No monuments with the two of us staring benevolently down at the ruins of the world we'd conquered.
Of course the world was ruled by damned dirty apes at the time and…
No, I'm just fucking with you. I can't back that one up. That has to be like the oldest time traveler joke in the book. I don’t even have a time machine. The things are a pain in the ass.
Everyone’s always going on about how impossible it is to travel through time. What the movies never account for is you have to invent faster than light travel while you’re inventing the ability to travel through time. No one ever thinks of relative positions of astronomical objects.
Think about it. The earth is constantly rotating around the sun at fabulous speeds. The sun is rotating around the center of the galaxy at even more fabulous speeds. The galaxy is falling towards other galaxies at still more mind boggling fantastical speeds and meanwhile spacetime is expanding all around us.
My point is any time machines strapped to the back of a DeLorean that stayed in the same physical location when they traveled through time would wind up in the middle of the earth for trips lasting about a minute, and in deep space for trips lasting, say, thirty years.
Sorry. Time travel rant off. No damned dirty apes and no traveling through time for me unless we’re talking forward. Besides, my mind was racing because that’s what it always did when I was in a tough spot.
Right. Dr. Lana pointing a wrist blaster at me. That was a far bigger problem than the temporal issues of traveling through time in ‘80s kitsch.
“Come on. Thi
nk about it. You don't think somebody's going to notice he's missing?" I asked.
Dr. Lana shrugged. "I just make up some excuse about students being off on an experimental run in someplace like Antarctica where we don't have to worry about them being out of contact. Families buy that for long enough."
"Long enough?"
"Long enough for me to finish my plans for taking over the world. At that point it won't matter what I do,” she said.
“Ah. I bet you’re also the kind of person who runs up your credit cards because you’ll totally have enough money to pay it off later when the bill comes due,” I muttered.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re a smart girl. Figure it out. Eventually all this illegal shit is going to catch up to you.”
“When you’re the ruler of the world nothing you do is illegal!”
"How Nixonian of you," I said.
She threw her head back and laughed. "Have you looked at the caliber of leadership we’re getting in the former free world these days? Nixonian is a step up at this point. The world is going to welcome me and my iron fist!"
I shrugged. She might have a point there, but it wasn't a point I was going to concede.
I didn't pay that much attention to politics, after all. It didn't matter when I was single-handedly more powerful than any political entity in this world. Never mind that I hadn’t quite been able to parlay that power into actually ruling the world. Yet. Thanks to interruptions from distractions like Dr. Lana.
And Fialux.
But if the world was taking a bend towards the authoritarian I figured that was all the better. It would make it that much easier when I eventually completed my own plans to rule the world. If the world was going to be ruled under any sort of fist it would be a carbon-fiber fist backed by a nuclear reactor, and it would belong to me thank you very much.
"You're crazy if you think I'm ever going to let you get away with this," I said.
"You know I think I am going to have trouble taking over the world, now that you mention it," she said.
I stared her down. She looked like she was being absolutely serious. Which left me wondering what her angle was.
I was intimately familiar with the inner workings of a villain’s psychology, and that left me more than a little suspicious about where she was going with this. If I were the one saying something like that then I would be setting myself up for one hell of an awesome one-liner.
She stood there with anticipation written plain on her face. I sighed.
“Go on. Say whatever you’re going to say.”
She grinned. She looked for all the world like a high school drama kid who wasn’t quite good enough to do their lines without getting the cue from other people onstage. The kind of kid who fell apart the moment things got a little screwy.
Not that I knew anyone who’d had those troubles in high school drama, thank you very much. My performance as background character number four in Barefoot in the Park is unimpeachable, thank you very much.
"I am relying on technology that I've mostly stolen from you, and everyone who's watched your disappointing career after I kicked you out of this department knows how little you've actually gotten done on the whole world domination front," she said with a big smile. “If all I have are the same tools you had at your disposal it’d be a wonder if I ever got anything done on the world dominating front.”
And there we were with the smarmy one-liner. I tightened my hands into fists and bit back a growl. The last thing I wanted was to let her know her taunts were actually working.
If you let the enemy know they were getting to you then they’d won half the battle.
"No reaction," she said. "That's good. Then again I’d expect nothing less from one of my students."
"I was never your student," I growled. “I am what I am despite being held back by you and your precious department. Not because of you.”
Damn it. There I was letting her know she was getting to me. But if there was one thing that could piss me off it was this bitch. This woman who’d spent her entire professional life worming her way into a position of power so she could abuse that position of power to get access to things other people had invented and claim them as her own.
And now she had the audacity to claim responsibility for me? As though she was a mentor or an Obi Wan to me?
Yeah. Fat chance. She knew the truth, and it was obvious from her grin that she knew that was a way to get at me.
Though I guess when it came down to it I did have to admit the whole angle of getting into a position of power so she could let other people do the work was a good one, even if I did look down on her for not doing her own damn work.
“I take credit for all my students,” she said with a wide grin that said she was enjoying twisting that knife.
"Big words from a hack who’d be kicked out of her own program for plagiarism if the university knew what you were up to."
"What the university doesn't know won’t hurt me," she said. "And besides. I'm not a hack who was copying other people's work. I’m merely appropriating good ideas so I can devote more energy to my plan for world domination."
"Which is?" I asked.
She wagged a finger at me. "Oh no. I'm not going to fall for that one. Do you think I'm going to give away my whole plan so you can go trying to defeat me? Please."
I tried to hide my disappointment. Damn it. I’d really hoped she’d fall for that. So far she’d fallen into just about every other villain trap that ultimately leads to their defeat. A list of traps I’d painstakingly put together over the years to make sure I didn’t fall into them, though sometimes I’d learned about them after falling into them.
Oh well. You couldn’t have everything.
"If we’re not going to get anything useful out of each other then we might as well get down to the fighting part of things," I said.
She held her hand up and motioned for me to come at her. Which was in itself a copy of a move from Keanu Reeves. Even when she was taunting me she couldn't do anything original.
"I thought you were never going to get done jawing at me. Let's do this."
7
Fight
I growled and threw myself at her. I was going to show this woman exactly why I was the best villain in the world. I was going to show her why…
Several things happened in rapid succession. Not all of them were necessarily good for that whole plan to show her why I was the best villain in the world.
My suit appeared around me along with my mask, but it came on in the wrong order. Damn it. It wasn't exactly going to affect the functionality or my ability to do my job, but it was a distraction I didn't need right now.
Again, not for the first time I found myself missing CORVAC. He would’ve gotten it right. The problem was I was afraid of allowing the new AI too much autonomy considering how giving a computer too much autonomy had backfired spectacularly the last time I tried it.
No, from here on out I needed my AI heavy on the A and not so much on the I.
The next thing that happened really ruined my day though. Dr. Lana held up another device that looked surprisingly familiar. Familiar enough that I wondered how the hell she got access to the damned thing considering I'd come up with the anti-Newtonian field well after I finished my tenure here at the Applied Sciences Department.
I hadn’t even conceived of the thing until I'd moved to my own secret lab under the Starlight City suburbs, so how the hell was she standing there with one in her hands looking at me with a supremely self-satisfied smirk?
The only thing I could think was she’d somehow been monitoring me at the exact moment when I captured Fialux in the halls of the journalism building. It seemed impossible, but that was the only explanation that made sense.
I guess it wasn’t too far outside the realm of possibility that she’d be monitoring most of the campus for any signs of people using technology she’d want to get her greedy little hands on. Yeah, that made sens
e. She’d seen a grainy security cam video or something and decided she wanted what I had all for herself.
That had to be it.
Otherwise I’d have to seriously consider the possibility that my systems had been compromised. I was still going to have to look into that possibility, leave no stone unturned if you wanted to survive in this business and all that, but right now denial and disbelief were taking over as I looked down the barrel of a device that could seriously fuck me over in this fight.
There was only one small problem with Dr. Lana's master plan to get rid of me once and for all, and it was the same problem with all of her master plans.
She was always so quick to appropriate other people's work, but she never seemed to stop and take the time to figure out the underpinnings of other people's technology that made it tick. Which meant that while she'd been quick enough to appropriate my design, she likely hadn’t bothered to learn how it worked.
I could tell because she had a triumphant smile on her face as she aimed at me. The sort of smile that said she clearly thought she’d already won. Only that couldn't be farther from the truth.
Because she was currently suffering from the same fatal flaw I’d run into when I used the damned thing fighting Fialux.
To be fair to Dr. Lana it's not like she had a superpowered individual to go up against. The limits of the anti-Newtonian field, particularly the way objects in motion tended to stay in motion, spectacularly so if you were dealing with someone superpowered like Fialux, had been glaringly obvious the first time I used it on her precisely because she was so powerful.
Fialux was so off the scale that she was able to blueshift the anti-Newtonian field almost immediately with no trouble at all. I was coming at Dr. Lana’s field with a little less power, but the principal still held.
An object in motion tended to want to stay in motion, and putting an object already in motion into an anti-Newtonian field only delayed that motion. It didn’t stop it entirely.