Maybe I should have payed attention the last two hundred or so, because this fight was different. Marcia started throwing her same punches, but Teddy's arms waved, and his shields turned her blows away at an angle rather than letting her punch through them. By the third punch, she was growling, and the fourth staggered her. A waving hand grew a fat stalagmite of sugar over her foot, and as he backed out of arm's reach, it grew up her leg.
I expected Marcia to bludgeon her way free. Instead she stopped still, clasped one fist into the opposite palm, and took a deep breath.
Blackness flooded out of her, a wave that came and went in the blink of an eye. It left us with a rain of sugary shrapnel as the crystal foot trap exploded.
Teddy clearly wasn't expecting that either. He backed off, nervousness reinforcing just how small he was. One arm waved, building up a domed shield that grew higher and higher, while the other fashioned a sharply pointed floating icicle behind him. I recognized that maneuver – slow Marcia down with an unappetizing quandry so Teddy could take time to think of a new strategy.
Snarling, Marcia did her thing. She punched the shield dead center. Her fist skidded on the curved surface, gouging a deep scar and pelting herself with bits of sugar that tore holes in her shirt and no doubt in her skin, but those healed as fast as they cut.
So did the shield. The sugar grew right back. Going straight through wasn't going to work.
Like in their first fight, Marcia went up, but instead of charging over to where the spear waited, she jumped, flipped in mid-air, and brought her foot down like an axe on the upper surface of the shield.
The shield wasn't as thick up here. Or maybe the kick hit harder. Another splash of black hid the details, but it left behind Teddy on the ground, squeaking and covering himself with his arms. “Okay, okay, I give!”
Growling so loud I could hear it over here, Marcia turned away from him, and punch by punch battered his shield into rubble.
Then her anger disappeared, and with a pleasant smile, she offered a hand and helped Teddy to his feet.
Arms enfolded one of mine. I looked back into the grinning, up-close face of Cassie.
“Hey there, Invincible Lass. We have a little problem.”
“Ah?” Okay, not witty, but she was too close, and too friendly. It screamed 'trouble.'
Cassie batted her eyelashes at me. A lost cause. She was a little too rough to ever be cute. Pretty, maybe. I was no expert on what boys wanted. But not adorable. “This tournament of titanlets has been really fun, but there's so many categories, and we've all fought each other like half a dozen times, but only one of us is going to get to fight you. That's crazy! We're still nowhere near as good as you, but- awww.”
That last came as I yanked my arm free, and obeyed my mother's explicit instructions. I ran away, in a literal 'shoes pounding' way. When I got across the street and risked a look behind me, Bull had hold of Cassie's wrist. She wasn't getting away from that.
And hey, I had honestly intended to stay for the whole day's sparring, but now I couldn't go back, I had the time free, and my new lab was right around the corner…
…which meant that Thursday, I have to make a confession.
Claire took it well.
“It's so adorable! And light!” she squealed, picking up my robot and spinning it around.
“It's mostly hollow, and the exterior is plastic. I got the idea from Polly's stepmom.” Maybe. Who really knew how my power decided anything?
Claire gave the robot a shimmying hug, like it was a big stuffed bear. “I love it. It looks like you, but the pigtails stick up instead of down.”
I squinted one eye, trying to see it. “Really? I think it looks like you.”
“The shape is exquisitely feminine,” Ray assured us both.
We were all exaggerating. My new robot was a little over half my height, alabaster white, with only hints of a face and blocky curves like a woman in armor. A not very developed woman in power armor. It superficially resembled my old protective jumpsuit, which had been mistaken more than once for power armor. The body was so lacking in detail, when I made it I'd checked the back for a 'Package Simplified To Reduce Cost' label.
Only three things stood out: The deft and humanlike hands. The seams at every joint, around the circle of the face, down the arms, and basically anywhere two plates joined. Most of all, the pigtails, or bunny ears, or antennae, or whatever you wanted to call them. Two slightly conical rods stuck out of the back of the head, pointed just a little higher than straight back.
“The console controls it perfectly,” I said with pride, flicking a finger up one of the side monitors and wiggling a joystick. Still in Claire's embrace, the robot raised one arm and ruffled her hair. Being Claire, this resulted in 'sultry dishabille' rather than 'bed head.' Ha! I didn't have to use the waldos to do it, or even sit down!
Okay, maybe I was kinda jazzed about this one. This was going to be like a miniaturized giant mecha pilot.
Holding my robot up at arm's reach, Claire spun around in a gleeful circle. “This is perfect! We'll pull the job tomorrow!”
“Say what now?” Ray and I chimed in together.
Claire tossed my bot up in the air, and caught it again. It was wonderfully lightweight, that was true. “Right after school. Think about it. The only people who will know the Inscrutable Machine isn't watching the tournament quarter-finals will have a vested interest in not letting that get out. Combined with the robot, we're helping our cover. We're giving the heroes, and your parents, exactly what they expect to see. Mom is all over that Purloined Letter stuff.”
I flapped my arms, a daring experiment aimed at making Claire see sense. “It has no weapons! I can't build any by tomorrow. My power's getting sluggish again. All it wants to make are bombs, and I don't want bombs. Plus, I'm almost out of computer parts to make the easy stuff.”
Perched against the edge of a control panel, Ray held up a lazy finger. “While it grieves me to question your immaculate wisdom, we do have leftover weapons. If we wish to imply Bad Penny has been a robot all along, rather than a fair and smoochable young maiden, it behooves us to rely as much as possible on recognizable Bad Penny technology. As I shall be here, providing directions, I volunteer my power ball gloves.”
Those didn't fit all that well. Ray's hands were bigger than mine, and mine were bigger than the robot's. Between stretchy fabric and opening and shutting wrist joints to act as clamps, we made it work. My teleport bracelets fit on the robot's upper arms.
We also had that pile of mystery weapons I got as gifts. I had figured out exactly one of them. When Irene called it a 'Push Rod,' I'd felt safe experimenting with the rune-covered scepter, and had a rudimentary feel for how it worked. I clamped that onto the robot's back like a sword.
That was starting to look like a supervillain, but… “Hmmm. One more thing.” After running halfway across the lair, I grabbed a handful of cursed pennies off of the jade statue in the dungeon. I returned to the summoning circle, holding them up in honor. “I should never go supering without these.”
Claire leaned over my control panel, finger out, scanning the many, many, many buttons and switches. To my delight, these included a set of dials that matched the Push Rod's rings. A section of keyboard had flipped over the moment I attached the rod to the robot's back.
She found what she was looking for. “This looks like a launcher, I guess?” She tapped a spot on the monitor with the robot diagram, and a panel in the robot's right arm popped open. I poured the pennies inside, and Claire poked the monitor again.
Nothing happened. She poked a couple more times. She fiddled with a joystick. She stuck her hand in a waldo and waved it around. Her scowl deepened with every failure. “The controls froze up. They're not responding.”
I abandoned the robot itself, and slid into the pilot seat. A touch of my finger to the same monitor closed the penny slot. A push of the joystick, and the robot took a few steps. “It works for me.”
Ray watched
those steps with a peculiarly perplexed expression. “Wow, that is creepy. It walks like you now, My Malignance.”
My face tilted down, so I could peer up at him over my glasses skeptically. “Now, that is just random flattery.”
His smile lit up into a gleefully lurid leer. “Oh, no, Most Ambulatory One. I watch you walk all the time.”
My shoulders tensed, and my cheeks started to ache. Well, the little talk we'd had on our date had sure worked.
Initiate subject change! “I guess we're minimally ready, but I don't have much time to practice. Do we really and truly have to pull this job tomorrow?”
Claire folded her arms under her chest, and gave a savage nod. “Yes. Not only is tomorrow afternoon the perfect cover, we have to act as soon as possible, because…” Looking suddenly guilty, she lifted one hand and rubbed the back of her head. When neither Ray, nor I, believed any display of shame in a Lutra, she flashed us a grin instead. “…I found out about this opportunity by stealing your dad's mail.”
he Ivory Tower? That's practically next door!”
Claire hoisted me – okay, the robot, but I liked using the VR helmet for immersion – higher onto her shoulders, and skated around the far side of the block before heading southwest. We never came anywhere near where the other kids could see. The good part of announcing a mission one day and launching it the next was that Sue hadn't had time to find out about it.
Ray spoke into our ears – again, okay, he was next to me, and Claire had an ear piece, “It would be madness to reverse engineer a windfall of mad science on the University of Southern California campus. Far more sensible to do the work downtown, in a crowded metro area, where no students can get hurt.”
“There would have been superheroes guarding the exhibit, like Penny's dad or Mech or somebody, if the letter asking Brian Akk to make arrangements hadn't mysteriously gone astray,” said Claire, weaving around a packet of pedestrians. She did a great job of sounding like she was making a legitimate argument, and not bragging.
I had never appreciated how fast she could go on these inserts. Wow. It clearly wasn't enough for her tastes. A bus was going by, barely faster than us, and she shot her grappling hook up, jumped onto the side of the moving bus, and climbed right up to the top. The people inside merely looked amused. We got a couple of looks from pedestrians, but that's it. Maybe a lot of superheroes and villains who couldn't fly rode atop buses.
Or it might be Claire's power. It was so weird seeing her through a robot's eyes. The mind clouding effect didn't come through at all. I could get a good look at her now, and with her power turned on, Claire wasn't Claire. She looked more like that other girl named Claire in the club, the one who wasn't allowed in the tournament. Golden hair, curly rather than sleek, a dimple, a much rounder face, deeper blue eyes, maybe a little more rounding in the figure, but in places like upper arms rather than the strategic allocations where Claire was way ahead of the thirteen year old game.
Hey, was there another girl named Penny with super powers in our school? She hadn't shown up at the club, but I thought I remembered Claire mentioning her. I'd never seen anybody with braids like mine in our school, so she wouldn't be instantly obvious. I'd never seen anybody with braids like mine who didn't have super powers. What would Mom think about that?
She'd lecture me on sample size, duh.
There was only one thing to do. I played with the switch that made my robot's pigtails wiggle. Claire giggled appreciatively above the sounds of traffic.
“Having fun?” she asked.
I watched a young woman in a Halloween witch costume fly by on a broomstick, going the other direction. “Yes. I didn't know how much I missed this. I wish I could feel the wind.”
“Your heart is beating a mile a minute,” said the girl with her arms around my chest.
Except, of course, that it wasn't my chest. “What?”
“Honest and for true! I can feel it.” She laid a hand right over the center of my robot's chest.
“Weird. There shouldn't be a sensor for that.”
Ray said, “Mad Science at its finest. If we are lucky, we got a heartbeat synthesizer instead of a self-destruct switch.”
“No, the self-destruct is…,” I started to say, then trailed off. Claire's smirk was bad enough. I didn't want to take off the helmet and see Ray's. The response had been automatic, except I didn't actually have an answer. Just an itchy feeling that something self-destructy existed.
Ray's arm brushed my real shoulder, and I had a sense of him leaning over me to mess with my keyboard. “Maybe this will make up for having no sense of touch?”
Targeting reticles started springing up, bouncing between people on the street. Then cars, and then lighting up every bird in the sky, including a bunch I hadn't noticed. “Ooh, that could be useful. I have got to install missile launchers in this robot. Maybe pie missile launchers? Something appropriately non-fatal and mad-sciency.”
“Marshmallows,” suggested Claire.
“Glue,” offered Ray.
That made me snort. “Destroying walls and stealing rare artifacts is one thing. People forgive. I'll make eternal enemies if I mess up people's hair and they have to cut some off.”
“No blowing up walls today,” said Claire. Hoisting me under one arm, she stood on the top of the bus, grappling lined a traffic light pole, and swung down to the street, all smooth as you please. Didn't stop talking for a moment, either. “My mom refuses to believe I'm ready. We're going for classic cat burglary. In and out. Ghosts in the night.”
“It's the middle of the afternoon,” I pointed out.
“You're wearing less than a tenth as much fabric as a ghost costume, fur included,” said Ray.
Claire was certainly professional with those frictionless skate inserts. We were downtown, now, and she had a lot of pedestrians to weave around.
Not 'downtown' downtown, mind you. The other little downtown just south of the hills, in the Vine Street area. They looked a lot alike, with pretty white not-nearly-tall-enough-to-be-actual-skyscrapers and a lot of glass and some gargoyles and architectural variation.
One of the more generic buildings was USC Off-Campus Site 3, affectionately referred to by my dad and his retroengineering buddies as the Ivory Tower.
“Don't you think this whole thing is kind of sad?” I said, gazing up at its maybe eight stories of shiningly bland glory.
“Not you, too!” Claire wailed.
“I mean the letter. That somebody ripped off a bunch of college kids who just wanted their mad science powers accepted.”
“At least Happy Days Academic Enthusiasm Non Profit Organization got caught before they could run the contest twice. My eyes are on the prize. Do you think you can teleport us up?” She pointed at the roof.
I winced, although of course she couldn't see that. My left eye twitched a few times. Yes, the robot could teleport, but… “Not going to try, nope. If the bands work on a robot like they do on a person, I'll rip my legs off.”
Ray's floating voice agreed, “She needs those legs. They're her only means of support. She can't let you carry her through life.”
Pouting, Claire slung me over her back again. As I held on to her shoulders, she fired her grappling gun at the clock tower across the street. Zooming up to the edge of its roof, she thrust out a clenched fist. The static cling gloves hidden in her fluffy cat paw mittens fired, sticking her palm to the stone long enough for her to fire again, hooking the top of the Ivory Tower.
I'd seen her flip up onto a roof with artificially enhanced grace before, but this was my turn. Point at the edge of the roof as we approached, grab on, double-tap a joystick, and my robot cartwheeled nimbly onto the rooftop, landing side by side at the exact same time as Claire herself.
Ha!
Nudging my robot to stay crouched, I said, “We have arrived. Ray, status report!”
“Floor plans loaded. I obtained them from a graduate student online guidebook. I'm monitoring your alternate sensors, mo
st of which remain unidentified. We are as ready as we can be, until Claire reveals her mysterious plan.”
“Sweet!” declared Claire, scooping me up in one arm again. She carried me over to the little roof access door, fished some lockpicks out of her furry catgirl top, and in a few seconds, had the door to a generically institutional stairway open.
With me held in both arms like an oversized plastic doll, she tromped down one flight, and pushed open the door, walking out into a hall sparsely populated by guys in lab coats. In my limited experience, academic scientists loved their lab coats as much as mad scientists loved their goggles, and with a similar lack of concern for if they were needed.
Awww, Tesla's uncomfortably clingy boxers! I should have put goggles on my robot.
Humming merrily, rocking me from side to side, Claire walked up the hall and peered at the door numbers. She gave friendly nods to the couple of college kids she passed.
Taking off the virtual helmet, I smacked it down on its holder. “This is your plan?”
“This is my plan!” chirped Claire's voice from the speakers. The view on the monitor wobbled as she hoisted my robot higher, so she could whisper. “Mom says – over and over and over – that stealth is more than just not being seen. It's the middle of the afternoon. Grad students are playing with their mad science toys. A kid in a costume carrying one around isn't weird or threatening. Watch this.”
Some of the rooms we passed were big classroom-sized laboratories. Others were little offices. Claire leaned into one of those that had its door open, and asked the bearded guy inside, “Professor Slink? How are the specimens laid out? I wasn't told exactly where to take this one.”
He gave us a kindly, distracted smile. He did have a pile of books and an open spreadsheet on his monitor. “I'm not surprised. We keep moving them around. There's a chart posted inside the door in each examination room. If that robot isn't on any of them, we have spare tables in 818.”
Please Don't Tell My Parents I've Got Henchmen Page 23