by Gini Koch
Not a problem. Just made me angrier that she’d hurt my friends.
Sandra looked a little mussed up, but she got to her feet easily. “You will complete your test,” she said. Her voice sounded a little slurry, which meant the men had managed to do some small damage at least. We circled each other, like fighters in the ring. I wished Tito were here—he was a really good coach for me when it came to Mixed Martial Arts fighting outside of the octagon.
“I don’t think so. I’m planning to flunk this exam.”
She feinted and I swung my metal bar at her. I hit her head. The het think bar bent. Her hair and the skin on her face were kind of messed up, but other than that, not a lot of damage done. I tossed the bar away as I jumped back to avoid her reaching for me.
“You can’t win. I’m so much better than you.” I waited for her to shoot projectiles of some kind at me, but she didn’t. So either she was out of ammo or I was supposed to be taken alive. Either option was better for me.
“Blah, blah, blah. I’ve heard that one before. So, you killed Susan?”
She shrugged as she moved her neck in a weird, totally nonhuman way. “It was expedient.” Her voice wasn’t slurring any more, and what I’d done to her head didn’t look nearly as impressive now, either. Too bad, the damage wasn’t much. Yet.
“John in on this plan?”
“Hardly. He, like the others, will be dead soon.”
“How’s that? I’m not letting you out of here alive. I mean, alive for you, which, I guess, means I’m yanking your battery.”
She shrugged. “I am only one part of the operation.” She smiled nastily. “I won’t have to listen to you much longer, though. And you’ll never see your husband and friends alive again.”
This was probably supposed to scare me and maybe make me offer to come quietly as long as they left the others alone. But I knew how “they” worked. I had no clear idea who was behind this, though Esteban Cantu was up there on my Perennial Top Three Suspects List. But the League of Evil Masterminds all rolled the same way—lie to get you to do what they wanted, then kill you and anyone else they felt like. Well, not this time.
All Sandra’s threat did was move me from really pissed off up to enraged. Excellent.
“So, who’s pulling the puppet strings on this one, Pinocchia?”
She gave me a nasty look. She had to be one of Marling’s creations—the man had been a loon of the highest order, but he’d done amazingly good work, and he was particularly good at creating androids so unlikable you’d never suspect them of being more than human. “The last person you’d ever manage to suspect.”
Sandra hadn’t attacked yet. We were still circling each other and she was likely stronger, even if I was at my most enraged state. So what was she waiting for? Me to attack? Reinforcements? The signal that my husband and friends were dead or captured?
“So, who’s that? If you’re going to take me dead or alive, might as well tell me who’s giving the directions for you to do so.”
She smirked. “Why not? My instructions were given to me by Charles Reynolds.”
True, this was the last person I’d ever suspect of these machinations. And also true, the fact that the smartest guy around had been stymied at every turn lent a certain credence to the idea that he was in charge and therefore ensuring nothing concrete was found. And maybe if I’d only known Chuckie for the past few years I’d have believed it.
But I’d known him for more than half of my life, and I still knew him better than anyone alive. And among the many things he wasn’t was the kind of person who would do these evil, underhanded things. I als thf ofo knew how much our enemies hated him. It didn’t take a lot of mental effort to figure that Sandra had been told to tell me Chuckie was in charge in the hopes of slamming the Wedge of Separation between us so strongly that it would never come out.
That was the goal, I was sure. Only that wasn’t the outcome. The outcome was that I was now seeing red I was so furious.
I lunged at her. Either she really hadn’t expected it or I was moving so fast she couldn’t tell, but she wasn’t able to block me. I slammed into her, and we slammed into the wall behind her.
And broke through.
Yi
CHAPTER 12
I WAS TOO MAD TO STOP, and besides, we hit another wall almost immediately because we were going so fast. We broke through that one, too.
Clearly my mutation wasn’t over, because I hadn’t been able to do this before. I knew A-Cs were strong enough to break through walls—Jeff, Christopher, and Michael Gower had had to do just that the last time we’d been here, after all. But I was breaking through the super walls on this level, and they had more than drywall and the fluffy pink insulating materials in them.
The positive was that I was breaking through using Sandra as my ramming mechanism. Not only was this ensuring that I wasn’t getting hurt, but it was obviously affecting her.
I sped up.
We slammed through, by my count, over a dozen walls before we hit something I couldn’t get through. Right, we were underground. I stopped running, and Sandra managed to fight back. Not as much as she’d done before, but still, I didn’t enjoy getting punched anywhere.
“Who’s really in charge?” I growled at her as I slammed her against the wall again.
“Charles . . . Reynolds . . .” The words were slurred and coming out slowly. “He . . . is . . . your enemy.”
Goody, my rage spiked again. I slammed us into the wall that didn’t want to give a few more times. This was fun, but I wasn’t sure if it was going to short her out or not.
I heard voices. I wasn’t sure where we were or who might be coming, but if it wasn’t our team, what the NASA folks would see was me beating up someone they’d assume worked here. No time for that. I was fully revved and running on waves of fury. Time to go up.
I ensured I had a really good grip on not only her clothes but her body, and then I ran us around the room twice to build up speed, then up the wall. Happily, my plan worked and we slammed through the ceiling and kept on going.
My memory shared that we’d gone down about five floors, so after we slammed through four more ceilings, I turned so we were once again playing nicely with gravity, gave it a shot, and headed us toward a wall. Breached it as if it were tissue paper, and lo and behold, we we su, so re outside.
I didn’t know this area very well, but the landmark I knew best was the lighthouse. I could see it, and I headed us for it. We were moving so fast I was certain no human could see us. I wasn’t sure if any A-C who wasn’t enhanced could see us, either.
We reached the lighthouse and I actually managed to stop us by the water’s edge. I didn’t want to go into the lighthouse, not yet anyway.
“We’re right by the alligator preserve. I guarantee that you can’t beat a full contingent of ’gators, even if you were at full power, which I know you’re not. Now, you tell me the truth or I toss you in and watch to see if my friends Gigantagator and Alliflash show up to reminisce.”
“I don’t have to tell you anything.” Her voice sounded funny—metallic and recorded, not real like it had before. Her eyes looked funny, too—they were glazed and looked like glass marbles with irises painted on them.
My brain none-too-gently reminded me that every recent superbeing cluster that had formed in either Paris or Paraguay had self-destructed before any of the good guys could manage to capture or disarm them. That Sandra had a self-destruct protocol installed seemed likely.
I spun her around and checked her back. Circuitry was definitely exposed. High school science shared that the body of water was big enough and the voltage probably small enough that no ’gators would be harmed. Worked for me.
I picked her up, chose a good spot in the swamp to aim for, and threw her in, hard.
Water splashed up and I saw a little smoke escape as Sandra went under. I waited. No explosion.
She didn’t bob to the surface, which made some sense. She had metal and wires and suc
h and so probably not the same amount of air humans did, ergo, she was going to sink versus float.
I saw what looked like a lot of floating logs converging on the area where I’d tossed her, which was still reasonably close to the shore. Time to get to higher ground.
I zipped to the lighthouse and up the stairs, doing my best to slow down along the way. Either my technique worked or I was out of hyperjuice, because by the time I reached the top, I was both going at a human walk and utterly exhausted.
Dug my phone out of my purse while watching the ’gators. They were still in the area and not following something moving, so I could hope Sandra was really shorted out and at the bottom of the preserve’s swamp as opposed to walking away underwater while laughing at me.
Jeff answered on the first ring. “Where are you? Are you okay? What the hell happened?”
“At the top of the lighthouse, enjoying the view and having Operation Drug Addict flashbacks. I’m really tired, but otherwise I’m fine. Sandra was an android and I tossed her in the swamp. I’m hoping that means she can’t self-destruct, and I’m also hoping someone can come and fish her out before the ’gators eat her and get sick.”
“Only my girl. We’ll be right there, baby.”
“She seemed to believe the rest of you were going to be dead or captured.”
“Might have been if Reynolds hadn’t been antsy. He insisted on the three of us snooping around, so we weren’t where the attack squad thought we’d be.”
“Interesting. Is everyone else okay, Richard and Malcolm in particular?”
“Yeah, they’re bruised up but insisting they’re okay. Per Christopher, we can wait to get back to my parents’ before we have them go to medical.”
“So, did you or Christopher pick up anything untoward going on?”
“No. Whatever that floor’s insulated with, we couldn’t get any reading from it.”
I chose to refrain from cursing, but only because it would have required more exertion than I felt up to. “Figures.” I spotted what I was pretty sure was a floater gate and shared as much with Jeff.
“Alpha Team is on the way.” As he said this, I saw Tim Crawford, the Head of Airborne, aka the guy who had my old job, step through. To human eyes, he would have appeared out of nowhere. I had no idea what it looked like to alligator eyes, but I could see some of them start to take an interest.
“Oh, good. Maybe one of them can carry me down from the lighthouse. After we’ve set up an electric fence to keep the ’gators at bay, that is.” I wanted to check on Gigantagator and Alliflash, if I could spot them in an alligator lineup, but I wanted to do this from a distance and with the really heavy animal-enclosure glass between us.
Jeff cursed quietly and in a moment I wasn’t alone on the top of the tower. I hung up and dropped my phone back into my purse as he picked me up. “You really overdid it, baby.”
“I could have let the evil android kill us all and take me captive, true. I officially never want to come here again. Just sayin’.”
He chuckled as he hypersped us downstairs, which coincided nicely with the rest of Alpha and Airborne teams exiting the gate. Well, the male portions of those teams were in attendance, meaning Paul Gower, James Reader, and the five flyboys were in here along with Tim. Serene was too pregnant to make any situation calls, and Lorraine and Claudia were still the mothers of newborns and therefore enjoying the last part of their maternity leaves.
The rest of the team with us arrived now, accompanied by Michael Gower, who was both Gower’s younger brother and an astronaut. Michael worked at NASA Base, so him being here wasn’t a shock.
“Who or what the hell broke through over fifteen walls and floors of the Base?” Michael asked before anyone else could speak.
I raised my hand. “Guilty. It messed the android up a lot, though, so it was all worth it. I think.”
Reader shook his head. “We can’t leave you alone for a minute, girlfriend.”
“This wasn’t my fault!”
“It’s never your fault,” Gower said. He heaved a sigh. “This is going to take some Pontifex-level charm to smooth over, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, I think it is. Good thing you’re so good with the smooth-talking, isn’t it?”
“Why are we waiting for the itiGood alligators to eat us?” Jerry Tucker, my favorite flyboy, asked.
“Kitty probably wants to catch up with old friends,” Reader said as he winked at me.
“I really want to take a long nap and figure out what the hell’s going on. But if we can toss a couple cases of chicken carcasses to the ’gators, I’m not against it.”
“I am,” Chuckie said firmly. “This is an unmitigated disaster. Thankfully, we can get some A-Cs here to do fast repairs to the building that you almost single-handedly destroyed.”
“Hey, it’s still standing. Besides, Sandra the Nasty Android really pissed me off.”
“Why so?” he asked.
“She said you were the one in charge of all the supersoldier stuff and my enemy.”
Chuckie gaped at me. So did most of the others. Reader and Gower, however, exchanged a very meaningful glance, and it wasn’t romantic.
“What?” Chuckie asked finally.
“We’ve gotten some anonymous messages insinuating the same thing,” Reader said.
Chuckie was still basically speechless. I could tell he was furious, hurt, suspicious, and the conspiracy wheels were turning.
I was about to reassure him that I, at least, didn’t buy it. But Amy spoke before I could. “As if.”
Everyone stared at her in shock, Chuckie in particular.
Amy rolled her eyes. “Look, Chuck and I have basically never gotten along, but there are a few things I know about him—and the number one thing is that he would never do anything to hurt Kitty.
“And maybe you all don’t remember Paris, but I sure do. There is no way he’s in charge of anything going on against Centaurion Division. All the bad guys wanted to kill him in even more horrible ways than they wanted to kill everyone else, and they weren’t exactly shy about beating the crap out of him. He was closer to dying than any of the other guys when we were captive. I don’t buy that even anyone as smart as Chuck is would want to be about three seconds from dying, no matter how much he might have expected Kitty and Richard to come save the day.
“The people who were friends and allies of my father’s aren’t taking direction from Chuck. They’d rather die. And no matter how sneaky all of you think he is, there’s no way he’s that good a liar. At least, no lie Chuck’s ever tried to pass has fooled me.” She looked at him. “Starting with the ‘Kitty and I are just best friends’ line you tried passing to me in ninth grade.”
Jeff grunted and Amy rolled her eyes again. “Jeff, seriously, Kitty’s missed you a lot this past month, but I have to be honest when I say I haven’t missed your jealousy crap one little bit. Chuck’s over her romantically, catch the obvious clues, will you?”
“You’re in a mood,” Christopher finally got out.
“People trying to kill me and everyone else while pinning it on a really easy, obvious, and yet so clearly innocent target pisses me off. Kitty and I aren’t all that different, you know.”
width="2em">Everyone else was still basically stunned into silence. “What Ames said. So, um, let’s fish Sandra the Android out of the swamp, assign some teams to fix the buildings, and get Malcolm and Richard to medical while we regroup and try to figure out what the hell is going on.”
“Let’s do what Kitty the Android Killer says,” Reader said. “I want our flock out of Dodge as soon as possible.” He patted Chuckie on his shoulder. “For what it’s worth, Paul and I agree with Amy and Kitty—it’s not you, but someone sure wants us to think it is
.”
“Who?” Chuckie asked.
I snorted. “Pick a target, we’re spoilt for choice.”
Reader sighed. “Just like always.”
Yi
CHAPTER 13
&nbs
p; “SO, DO WE DRIVE OR TAKE A GATE?” I asked.
All of Alpha and Airborne snorted. Jeff and Chuckie looked resigned. Christopher came through, though, and hit me with Patented Glare #3. I truly felt it was his favorite. “Alpha and Airborne didn’t arrive via floater gate to get to you more quickly. They used a floater because they had to—you destroyed the main hub apparatus for all of the gates at NASA Base while you were breaking down walls, floors and ceilings.”
“Bummer.”
Christopher switched to Glare #4 as Jeff rubbed the back of his neck, Chuckie rubbed his forehead, the flyboys grinned, and Tim, Reader, and Gower gave me a variation of the “why me?” look.
“Hey, sometimes the buildings in Metropolis get trashed while Superman’s protecting the world from Darkseid and Lex Luthor. It happens. I didn’t do it intentionally.” Well, not with malice aforethought. “So it’s a good thing we drove, right?”
“Nice spin,” Chuckie said. “Do you want me to stay?” he asked Reader.
“No. Get out of here along with the rest of our demolition crew,” Reader said. “We’ll call you if we need you to flash the badge, but right now, anyone who was down on that floor isn’t popular with NASA.”
“No time to stop and feed the ’gators?”
Jeff picked me up. “You seem tired, baby,” he said as he strode off quickly, the rest of our team following.
I waved to the guys who were staying behind. The flyboys waved with enthusiasm, the others not so much. Oh well. Surely they wouldn’t be mad at me for too long. Not forever, hopefully.
Jeff sighed. “No one’s mad at you. Not very much, anyway. It’s just an expensive, awkward situation to be in.”
“I thought we in Centaurion Division didn’t care about money.”
“We don’t mind spending it. But wasting it’s another story.”
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