“Is this it?” Billy asked, a tremor in his voice.
“We’re just about there. Don’t worry, I’ve done this plenty of times.”
“I’m not worried,” he lied.
She set him down gently on a platform she’d installed amongst the ice to accommodate her shorter frame. Then she lifted a hand to set it against the panel. It took a moment for the computer to analyze her prints and skin before it flashed green. The doors yawned open enough to let her inside.
Billy gaped at the doorway in awe. “You coming?” she asked.
This shook him out of his reverie. He smiled at her. “Aren’t I supposed to carry you over the threshold?”
“You can try,” she teased.
“Here goes nothing,” he said and then bent down to scoop her up. To avoid hurting his feelings, she levitated herself enough to make it appear he was carrying her. She stopped levitating when he went to put her down.
A service robot ambled up to them. Its eye flashed red for a moment. “Greetings, Gor-Bul,” it said.
“Who’s Gor-Bul?” Billy asked.
Starla felt her cheeks warm as she said, “That’s my alien name.” She had often thought of changing the robot’s protocols to use her human name, but she always decided she’d rather keep a small part of her alien self alive, so in some way her people still existed.
She turned to the robot and said, “Prepare my quarters for habitation.”
The robot bowed slightly and then shuffled off. “That’s pretty handy,” Billy said.
“The best part is I can turn them off whenever I want.” She winked at him. His face turned red as he must have understood the implication.
“How many other people have you brought up here?” he asked.
“Just the rest of the Super Squad…and Kate once. Nothing happened. I promise.”
She led Billy into the main room, which was dominated by a chair made of orange crystal. This chair was actually a computer that allowed her to access the collected knowledge of her people.
When she sat down the chair began to glow with orange light. Then a man who looked like an older, bearded version of her as a man appeared in front of her. “Greetings, my daughter. What do you desire?”
“I wanted you to meet my husband, Billy Leyton.” She motioned to Billy. To him she said, “This is a hologram of my father—my biological father.”
“Greetings, Billy Leyton,” the hologram said.
Billy leaned forward, his eyes narrowing. “Is he—?”
“He’s a hologram based on records of my father. He’s not real in any sense.”
“Wow. But you can talk to him?”
“The computer assembles a response based on certain algorithms.”
“Uh-huh.”
Her father turned back to her. “Have you brought him here to be tested for compatibility? I should warn you—”
“I know. That’s not why we’re here. We’re on our honeymoon.”
Her father’s image flickered for a moment as it looked for the definition of a honeymoon. “That is very wise, my daughter. I hope you enjoy your honeymoon.”
“We will.”
She stood up from the chair. The hologram turned off. Then she took Billy’s hand to show him the rest of the Crystal Lair. As they walked around, he asked, “What did he mean about testing for compatibility?”
“My people used genetic testing and mental evaluation to determine if they were a compatible couple.”
“And you don’t think I could pass the test?”
“It’s not that. The test is very dangerous for a human. That impostor tried it on Kate and it put her into a coma for a week. I couldn’t let that happen to you.”
“Oh, I see.” He leaned forward to kiss her in a way they couldn’t in church. “So, where are your quarters?”
“Let me show you.”
***
Starla and Billy had made love on many occasions in the last three years. Despite that, it felt like the first time when she led him into her bedroom in the Crystal Lair. In a way it was their first time, their first time as husband and wife. For that reason, she wanted it to be special.
Kate had taken her shopping a couple weeks ago to find something appropriate to wear for this night. It was red negligee that revealed even more than her Apex Girl costume. Staring into the mirror, Starla imagined what Ma would say if she saw her daughter in such an outfit. Well, Ma wasn’t here and Starla was a married woman now; why shouldn’t she wear something erotic for her wedding night?
She fussed with her hair a little to smooth it down after the flight from Rockford. Then she touched up her makeup. She thought of covering the freckles that dotted her face, but she knew Billy liked them. She put on a pair of fake glasses, knowing how much he liked her “geek girl” look. “Are you ready?” she called out.
“As ready as I’ll ever be.”
“Well, here I come.”
She pranced into the bedroom. She knew very little about exotic dancing, but she did her best to gyrate around in a way that might excite Billy. All it did was make him laugh. “What’s so funny? Don’t you like it?”
“Sorry, it’s just…unexpected.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Are we having our first fight as a married couple?”
“Maybe we are.” She crossed her arms over her chest and pouted. “Don’t you think I’m sexy?”
He got out of bed to rush over to her. “Sweetheart, you know I think you’re sexy. You don’t have to work so hard at it. I love you.”
“That’s why I was working so hard at it. I want this to be special.”
“It’ll be special no matter what you wear or how you dance,” he said. “You’re the most special person in my life.”
“You’re the most special person in my life.” They kissed again. When they parted, Starla asked, “Do you like this outfit?”
“What do you think?” he asked. She felt something rub against her thigh to answer her question.
“You dirty boy,” she whispered. She took his hand and led him to the bed.
***
Starla awoke to a voice saying, “Which one is it?”
“From the readings it’s the female.”
“Our information said it would be male.”
“The file must be out of date.”
Starla sat up in bed. She used a sheet to cover her naked body. Then she gasped in shock. There were two aliens in her bedroom! They were both bipedal like humans but one had lavender skin with silver hair while the other had scaly blue skin with three yellow eyes and two pincers instead of hands. They each wore what appeared to be a black jumpsuit.
“Who are you?” she said.
“It’s alerted to our presence,” the lavender one said.
“It doesn’t matter. Our orders are clear.”
The blue-skinned one stepped forward. Starla took a deep breath and then let out a stream of flame. The fire came within six inches of the alien and then skimmed over it as if a bubble surrounded him.
She shook Billy’s shoulder, but he didn’t wake up. “What did you do to him?”
“It’s a simple sleep spell,” the lavender one said. “His people are especially susceptible to it.”
“Who are you two?”
The blue alien said, “I am Commander Sulfam and this is Lieutenant Kila. We have a warrant from the Galactic Peacekeepers for your arrest.”
“Arrest? On what charge?”
“You will be given more information once you are in custody. You can either come willingly or we can detain you by force.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Starla said. She threw the sheet aside and then lunged at the blue alien. A silver metal staff appeared in his hand. He whipped one end around to hit her in the head. The staff should have snapped in half or bent; instead Starla was thrown across the room, into a wall. She lay dazed for a moment.
Then she got back to her feet. Her fists clenched. “You two have made a big
mistake.”
She lunged forward again. This time as the blue alien brought the staff around, she jumped over it. Except as she cleared the staff, the tip of it lit up with purple light. A burst of lightning slammed into her, sending her into the ceiling.
The lavender alien plucked her from the air. It slapped a silver bracelet around her wrist. “You will come with us, Gor-Bul of Kor-Gan. You have much to answer for.”
Starla tried to grab the lavender alien, but a shock ran through her entire body. She tried again with the same result. When she tried to tear off the silver bracelet, an even greater shock ran through her, this one enough to bring her to her knees. She screamed with pain and frustration.
“Transport bubble is activated,” the lavender alien said. Starla found herself rising into the air. She reached out towards the alien with one hand, but her fingers brushed against a force field of purple light.
As she rose through the ceiling of the Crystal Lair, she screamed Billy’s name, but he continued to sleep.
Chapter 2
Through his lawyer, Hitter had filed twenty-three separate requests to be transferred from the secure wing of Guantanamo Bay to at least the general population of the prison, if not a nice maximum-security prison back in the States. Even one of those gulags in Siberia would have been preferable to this madhouse.
He didn’t deserve to be here, among all these freaks. He had never dressed up in a costume, unless you considered a black trench coat and a gray Armani suit to be a costume, in which case most of the fucks on Wall Street should be in here with him. He had never tried to take over the world. He had never used any ray guns or irradiated bees or any crazy shit like that.
The tools of his trade were a sniper rifle, a 9mm Beretta with silencer, C4 plastic explosive, and a garrote wire. Hitter was an assassin, pure and simple. Not even one of those ninja assassins like the yakuza used. He was an ordinary guy from Leeds who killed people for money. Why should he be stuffed into a cell with a shithead like Rad Geiger?
“No one understands,” Geiger said. “Radiation is the key to everything. It’s the only way we can ever achieve perfection.”
“Yeah, so you’ve said,” Hitter said. He didn’t look up from his worn copy of Jugs & Ammo. Geiger went into this same rant at least three times a day. Hitter’s pleas with the warden about a new cellmate fell on deaf ears like his transfer requests.
“If only that bitch Apex Girl didn’t keep interfering.”
“You and me both, mate,” Hitter grumbled. It hadn’t been Apex Girl who’d brought him in. It had been that little cunt Midnight Spectre. He’d been on a job in Vatican City to take out a cardinal who was in the running to be the next pope. His employers didn’t think the cardinal would be the sort who would be good for business so they decided to have him snuffed.
For the job Hitter had used some special effects to assume the identity of a Vatican priest. The priest was an assistant to the cardinal in question. All Hitter had to do was drop a little poison in the cardinal’s morning tea and then he’d meet his boss up in Heaven.
He’d gotten the cup of tea easy enough. It was on his way up to the cardinal’s room that a shadow detached from the wall. Before he could turn around, he had a bolo around his legs. He dropped to the floor, where he looked up at a kid in a black mask and hood. The girl leveled a Taser at his chest. “Well, my son, do you have any sins to confess?” she hissed at him.
“I’d say fuck you but you’re under age,” he said, hoping it might get the little bitch off her game enough that he could wriggle out of the bolo.
“You’re not my type anyway.”
It was over after that. She called for the Vatican’s guards and they took him away. As an English citizen captured in Vatican City he ordinarily wouldn’t have ended up in an American prison in Cuba. Except there was a little-known law known as the Supervillain Extradition Act. This allowed the world’s most heinous criminals to be locked up in this madhouse so they couldn’t run amok among the general population. Not that this seemed to stop people like Geiger or Clownface, who escaped three or four times a year.
Or at least they had until three years ago. No one had escaped since Holloway Corporation had taken over security of the place. The US government was still nominally in charge, but Holloway Corp’s mercenaries were the ones who wielded the real power. It was all part of that little dyke Robin Holloway’s plan for world peace or some shit like that.
Hitter didn’t believe in world peace. Not just because it would mean his business would dry up. Since he’d first gone with his father to the track at the tender age of three, he understood humans were little better than the animals they bet on. Humanity’s default mode was to screw each other over. A kid with a silver spoon up her ass like Holloway couldn’t understand how greed and desperation shaped the lives of the ninety-nine percent to keep them in an almost primitive state. When you could call up a private jet to take you to Zurich if you felt like skiing, you couldn’t understand the foolish hope that poisoned the souls of people like Hitter’s dear old dad. Until rich bitches like her found a way to bring the rest of the world up to her level, there would never be world peace. Even then, someone would always want something they didn’t have: a woman, a man, a car, even a fucking dog that belonged to someone else. That was how the world worked. Why should he be punished for giving these people what they wanted?
“If they looked over my calculations—”
Hitter turned away from Miss December’s lovely face to glare at Geiger. “You don’t put a sock in it, mate, I’m going to carve some calculations in your ass.”
Before Geiger could reply, the whole cell rocked. It might be an earthquake, but Hitter smelled something in the air: his old friend C4. Someone had blown one of the cells. Probably Clownface or one of those freaks. The guards would probably catch him before he could get into the Caribbean—
The door for Hitter’s cell was torn off its hinges. Fred Flintstone’s brother stood in the doorway. With his thick, protruding brow and tiny brain the seven-foot-seven pillar of muscle was known as Neanderthal. He hurled something black at Hitter—a gas mask.
“Put on,” Neanderthal growled.
“Where’s mine?” Geiger whined.
“You not go,” Neanderthal said.
Hitter was going to ask what the hell this was all about, until green smoke began to fill the room. He put on the gas mask and watched as the smoke filled the cell. Geiger thrashed around for a few moments before he finally collapsed to the floor.
Hitter hopped off his bunk. He tucked his magazine into his jumpsuit and then patted Neanderthal on the arm. “You finally shut him up. Thanks, mate.”
“Now, we go,” Neanderthal said.
“Lead on.”
***
As he walked out of the prison, Hitter noted all of the guards and inmates sprawled on the floor. From the way their chests rose and fell, he knew they were knocked out, not dead. Pity. Shits like Geiger deserved put out of their misery.
Neanderthal was the only one not wearing a mask who didn’t seem affected by the gas. It was probably his tougher, more primitive system. Or maybe he was too damned tall for the gas to reach; Hitter had failed science class back at primary school.
With everyone else down for the count, Hitter and Neanderthal easily walked out of the prison. At the gate, Hitter saw they weren’t the only ones who were breaking out. Killer Whale and Ion Man stood beside the gate, the latter tapping his foot with impatience. “About time you two got here,” he said.
“What the hell is this? How’d you two get out?”
“I was working in the machine shop when someone tossed me a mask and then gas began to fill the room.”
“A similar thing happened to me,” Killer Whale said.
“Then we must have a benefactor,” Hitter said. Neanderthal obviously couldn’t have pulled off something like this on his own; he didn’t have the cranial capacity for it.
“Go to beach,” Neanderthal ordered.
“Fine with me. I’ve been wanting to work on my tan,” Ion Man said. He fell in beside Hitter as they walked through the gate. “You hear any skinny on who might have done this?”
“I’m as surprised as you are.” More surprised he was sure. He had never associated with the likes of these three in his career; he didn’t even sit near them in the cafeteria. There was no obvious connection at all between the four of them other than they were all inmates of the same prison. But if you wanted to break out four inmates, why them and not some of the others? Neanderthal was stronger and tougher than a normal human and Killer Whale could talk to fish, but Ion Man was just a rogue engineer and Hitter an assassin; they didn’t have any superpowers, nor in all honesty did they have much of a reputation.
As they neared the beach, the hair on the back of Hitter’s neck went up. Years as an assassin had given him a sixth sense for trouble that almost never failed—except back in the Vatican. This time he saw it was right on the money.
Midnight Spectre waited for them on the beach.
***
The little shit had the audacity to grin at them. Neanderthal roared like a wild animal and then charged forward. He tried to wrap his arms around Midnight Spectre, but they went right through her. A hologram.
“Sorry to disappoint you, big boy. I thought it better to take certain precautions.”
“What the hell is this?” Ion Man said. “Were you punking us this whole time?”
“No. I have a job that requires your particular talents—all four of you. So here’s the deal: you can either work with me or go back to prison.” The hologram put up a hand. “Before you think you can escape on your own, you should know Holloway Corp has put a chip on every prisoner in there. It tracks your movements should you attempt to escape. I’m blocking the signal right now, but if you don’t play ball with me, I’ll stop blocking it. You’ll have the Velocity Gals there in about three seconds to take you back.”
“What sort of job is this?” Hitter asked.
“It’s the kind I think you’ll like. You’re going to destroy the Super Squad.”
“A lot of people have tried that, love. All it did was land them here.”
Girl Power Omnibus (Gender Swap Superhero Fiction) Page 47