by Mia Archer
“There you go,” I said. “Now no one is going to bother wondering about the big hole in the ground. It’s been filled in by the nice explosion and you can keep using the place!”
“Thanks, I think?” the SCNN chick said.
I walked over to her. I figured if Natalie wasn’t going to do introductions then it was high time I took care of business. I held my hand out to her.
“Nice to meet you,” I said. “I’m Fialux.”
“Um, nice to meet you too,” she said. “Though technically we have run into each other a few times in the past.”
“Right,” I said. “And your name is?”
“Oh, sorry,” she said, blushing ever so slightly. “Nancy Norris.”
“And you are?” I asked, turning to the other girl.
“Technomancer,” she said with a grin that seemed just a touch unhinged. “Nice to finally meet you when you’re not trying to kill me!”
She shook my hand rather vigorously. Then I noticed there was something odd about the way she was shaking my hand. There was a slight tingle, and when I looked down I saw there was a little buzzer in her hand that had the same pink glow as all the other stuff people had been throwing at me lately in an attempt to rob me of my powers.
I pulled the thing off of her hand and held it up. Then shook my head.
“That was very naughty of you,” I said, crushing the thing between my fingers. It fizzled a couple of times and then there was a little spark of pink light that almost hurt, and it was gone.
Technomancer shrugged. “Had to try. You’ve been in the business long enough that I’m sure you understand and all that.”
“Right,” I said. “You’re an odd one, but I think I’m going to like you.”
Natalie cleared her throat behind me. I turned to face her, and she was totally serious.
“This little reunion is nice and all,” she said. “But I’m a little more interested in what you said about the city getting blown the fuck up? Do you maybe want to go into a little more detail about what’s going on there?”
“Oh, right,” I said, remembering the whole reason I was here in the first place. It was something I’d gotten a little distracted from considering all the reunion stuff going on here. “So the military has been hiding nukes all around the city, and it looks like they’re getting ready to use them.”
“But that makes no sense!” Natalie said. “We’ve been making great strides towards retaking the city! This is like the worst possible moment they could pick for trying to retake the city by blowing it the fuck up!”
“I mean it’s not really retaking the city if they’re turning it into a column of radioactive dust,” Nancy said. “That’s more like they’ve decided they aren’t going to win against the alien invaders in a fair fight, so they’re taking their ball and going home.”
“Wouldn’t that be they’re taking their nuclear football and going home?” Technomancer asked.
Everyone in the room turned and stared at her.
“That was a terrible joke,” Natalie said. “Even by the standards of some of the groaners you’re so fond of.”
“What?” Technomancer said. “They have to use the nuclear football to set off nukes. It’s a perfectly cromulent joke!”
Natalie rolled her eyes and turned back to me.
“So do you have any idea where these nukes are hidden?”
“Well I did see a computer screen where they had a map of everything,” I said. “At least I’m pretty sure it was a map of where all the nukes were being hidden. I can’t be completely sure.”
“Why can’t you be completely sure?” Natalie asked, speaking slowly and patiently.
“Because I maybe kinda sorta destroyed the computer they were using to show all those locations,” I muttered.
“I’m sorry?” Natalie asked, putting a hand to her ear. “I didn’t quite catch that. Could you tell me again why you can’t tell us where these things are?”
“Because I was busy destroying the facility around all the people when I caught a glimpse of the map showing where the nukes are buried!” I said. “Are you happy now?”
Natalie sighed. “I was afraid it would be something like that. Were you the cause of that sudden tornado over on the west ‘burbs?”
“Maybe I was,” I said. “But if you saw some of the shit they were doing to my clones in there you’d understand why they all had to die.”
My voice got hard there at the end. There was an edge there that I just wasn’t used to. Even Natalie blinked and seemed surprised at the heat in my voice.
“Damn,” she said. “Someone is good and pissed off at Uncle Sam.”
“You bet your ass I’m pissed off,” I said. “They were using a bunch of that pink shit to vivisect my clones, and they were about to do it to me too!”
“Something tells me there’s not a chance they’d be able to do that to you even if they wanted to,” Natalie said with a grin.
“Maybe not,” I said. “But they deserved what they got for what they were doing to those poor girls. Imagine waking up and having no idea where you are or why people are cutting you open.”
I could imagine it. I’d woken up with no idea why a bunch of assholes were trying to take me out.
“Hold on a second,” Nancy said. “So you’re telling me you killed a bunch of military types?”
I blushed and looked down. When she said it like that it sounded bad. I mean maybe it was a bad thing, for all that it hadn’t felt all that bad when I was in the middle of killing their asses.
“Maybe I did,” I said. “But they had it coming!”
“I’m sure they did,” Natalie said. “I’m proud of you. I never would’ve thought you were capable of something like this without an alien worm in there messing with you.”
“Yeah, well I am,” I said. “And we’re standing around here chatting while we should be looking for those nukes! Please tell me you have something you can use to track down radiation, otherwise the whole city is going to be one giant hunk of radioactive slag soon enough!”
Natalie grinned. “Of course I do. Now if y’all don’t mind…”
She wiggled her fingers just so, and a glowing orb on the other end of the room I hadn’t noticed before started to pulse. A moment later a new combo wrist blaster and wrist computer appeared on her arm. She held it up and it made an ominous little hum for a moment.
Satisfied, she moved the thing back down.
“Yeah, I think it’s time for us to get out of here,” she said.
She held her hand up again and the three of them started shimmering like something straight out of Star Trek. Even the green glowing orb that also looked like some of the cheesier special effects out of the Original Series.
They shimmered, sparkled, and were gone with a slight whine sound that I was pretty sure Natalie had piping out of speakers she had hidden on her person somewhere, because the sound disappeared the moment she did.
I felt something a little weird tingling all around me, but nothing happened. Of course nothing happened, though. I’d figured out some way to keep her from doing the old “beam me up, Scotty” thing, which incidentally was a phrase that never actually appeared in any Star Trek show.
Which, incidentally, was a fact I should’t have known before that wormy mind meld with Sabine that had apparently done a number on me.
I was left alone. I sighed. Looked up at the hole I’d just closed up with that exploding wrist computer, and figured I’d better get up there even if I was going to have to go the slow way rather than being teleported.
“Sorry Natalie,” I muttered. “Guess I’m going to have to fuck up your little lair again.”
I flew up. I figured she could forgive me when this was all said and done. Assuming we were victorious and the whole place wasn’t buried under the force of multiple atomic weapons going off at the same time, which still seemed like a very real possibility.
21
Nuke Hunt
“This kinda r
eminds me of the plot of a Godzilla movie or something,” Natalie said.
I floated up behind her. It’s not like it’d been all that difficult to find them. I just had to look for the group of women standing on the tallest bit of real estate in the city.
Which wasn’t as tall as the tallest real estate had been before the whole alien invasion thing. I guess I was sort of to blame for that, for all that I’d been under the influence of a dangerous alien worm at the time.
“Which one are we talking about?” I asked. “Like Heisei? Showa? Or are you talking about that 2014 abomination that had like five minutes of actual Godzilla footage?”
Natalie spun around and stared at me in disbelief.
“What’s that look for?” I asked.
“I’m just a little surprised that you’d know that much about Godzilla movies,” she said. “I tried to get you to watch those things time and again.”
“Yeah, well I guess having my brain networked to that Sabine crazy lady through that worm has put some nerd knowledge in my head,” I said.
Talk about sentences I was pretty sure had never been uttered in the history of history. Then again it’s not like mental networking through a bunch of parasitic worms was something that’d ever happened before.
Whatever.
“This is all nice and everything,” Nancy said. “But could we maybe focus on why the hell we’re here?”
I looked out over the city. Right. We were here to save shit. Not to talk about the merits of the old “obvious guy in a rubber suit” days of the Godzilla franchise versus the “still obviously a guy in a rubber suit but with better special effects” days from the ‘80s and ‘90s.
“Right,” Natalie said, glancing at her wrist computer. “I think we have something at the base of this skyscraper here, but I’m going to need a little help from you Selene.”
It took me a moment to realize she was talking to me. It’d been so long since someone used my real name that I wasn’t used to hearing it.
It was everyone staring at me expectantly that pulled me out of my funk.
“Right,” I said. “Where are we going?”
Night Terror stepped off the building and floated down. Technomancer also did the whole flying thing, and that green glowing orb thing put a weird shimmering force field thing around Nancy Norris to pull her down through the air.
We stopped in front of a massive pile of rubble that’d been the front of the building we were standing on once upon a time. Natalie pointed to it with her wrist blaster and a laser beam came out, though for a wonder it wasn’t a laser beam that actually destroyed anything.
Though that’s actually a common misconception that lasers can cause big explosions like what you see in the movies. Sure it might be possible, but lasers are really more of a “point and cut” kind of thing when you get down to it and damn it I was having this thought because of that bitch Sabine.
“What are you doing?” Nancy asked. “Aren’t you going to destroy the thing?”
“Are you kidding?” Natalie asked, sounding incredulous. “If I fire a plasma blast at that thing it might set off the nuclear part of the nuclear weapon. Do you have any idea what happens to someone when they’re at ground zero of an explosion like that?”
“You get turned into a shadow on the walls behind us,” Technomancer said in a weird tone that made it seem like she was almost happy about the thought of being turned into a shadow burn at ground zero.
“Correctoin. Y’all get turned into a bunch of permanent shadows,” Natalie said. “Pretty sure Fialux won’t have any trouble at all, and I’m almost certain my shields will protect me. CORVAC is going to be okay even if that orb gets destroyed.”
“Wait, that’s CORVAC?” I asked. “We’re talking the maniacal supercomputer who tried to kill us and destroy the city with a giant death robot?”
“Yeah, it is,” Natalie said. “And the last time we met you were trying to take over the city at the head of an alien army. Do you really want to get into this right now?”
“Right,” I said, blushing. “Point taken.”
“You’re damn right point taken,” Natalie growled. “Now I’m pointing at the spot where the nuclear weapon has been buried. Could you please get in there and carefully lift the thing out?”
“Why me?” I asked.
“Because you’ll survive that skyscraper falling on you if you fuck up, and you’ll be able to get out faster than the rest of us,” Natalie said.
“Fair enough. Let’s get to this.”
It didn’t take long for me to rip through the pile of rubble. I occasionally heard creaking or the sound of something collapsing nearby that had me worrying the whole thing was going to come down on top of me. Natalie and the rest of the mortals had moved to a safe distance.
Finally I pulled out something that didn’t look like the twisted wreckage sitting around the rest of the place. It was a bulky brushed metal briefcase and it looked like it’d been put there recently if that shiny metal was anything to go on.
“I’d give a pretty penny to figure out how the hell they got that in there,” I said.
“That’s probably pretty easy to figure out,” Natalie said, floating in now that I’d retrieved the nuke and the building hadn’t come down around me. “CORVAC?”
“He put it there?” I said, eyeing the floating orb critically. “I knew he couldn’t be trusted. He already tried to take over the world once and…”
Natalie held a hand up. I went quiet. “Please give him a moment. He’s doing something important with an intel asset we have back at the new lab.”
“The new lab?” I asked. “Am I missing something?”
“You sort of destroyed the old one,” Natalie said, and for a wonder she didn’t sound like she wanted to rip my lungs out.
That was impressive considering how much she loved that lab. Like we’re talking there were times when I thought her love affair with that lab might come between the two of us.
I also suddenly remembered that lab coming down all around me as I ripped it to pieces and knocked over a few things that eventually caused a chain reaction that destroyed the place entirely.
Oops.
“Um, right,” I muttered, suddenly not wanting to continue this conversation. “Really sorry about that.”
“You should be,” Natalie growled.
She opened her mouth like she was about to give me a piece of her mind, but then there was a pulse from the glowing green orb floating next to her.
“It would appear that Dr. Lana provided the military with some primitive versions of the teleportation she stoll from you, mistress,” the voice said.
“Well that’s fucking great,” Natalie said with a roll of her eyes. “So you’re saying they could transport nukes into the city at will?”
“It would also appear that the facilities required for the teleportation she sold them to work occupied the space of a large building,” the orb, CORVAC, continued. “And that building was apparently destroyed by Fialux in her latest rampage against the military-industrial complex.”
Another eye roll. “Well it’s nice to know that your little rampages are doing something, at least.”
“Huh,” I said. “Well that’s good, right?”
“Something like that,” she said. “What got into you, anyway? You’re free of the worm that was controlling you, and you never would’ve done something like that in the old days.”
I shrugged. “Are you really complaining that I’m feeling more villainous lately?”
“Can’t argue with that,” Natalie said with a grin, then she leaned in and kissed me on the cheek.
I put a hand to my cheek. I wasn’t expecting that kiss, but it was nice.
“What was that for?” I asked, still rubbing the spot where she’d kissed me and not quite believing she was doing it.
“For you being so ruthless,” Natalie said. “It’s a good look. We get you in some leather and we might actually have the beginnings of a team t
hat could take over the world!”
“I apologize for interrupting the love session mistress,” CORVAC said. “But it would appear that there are problems that might result in two fifths of our team expiring before you get a chance to take over the world.”
That was good for a couple of nervous glances from Nancy and Technomancer. I had no doubts they were the two fifths of the team, assuming CORVAC was included in that team, that would be having a very bad day if things went pear shaped.
“What’s wrong?” Natalie asked.
“It would appear that as a side effect of the teleportation process they were using there might be some degradation in the materials that were being transported,” CORVAC said.
I frowned. That didn’t sound good, but it was more his tone than what he was saying that made it not sound good.
“What’s he talking about?” I asked.
“What he’s talking about is Dr. Lana sold them some faulty machinery, which is about par for the course, and that means all the nukes they beamed into the city are now on the verge of maybe blowing early because the dipshit didn’t sell the military tech that would allow them to safely transport nuclear materials.”
“Oh, so that’s bad?” I asked.
“Very bad if you’re the kind of person who can’t survive a nuclear explosion or the radiation from a bunch of dirty bombs going off at the same time,” Natalie said. “Not quite as bad for you and me and CORVAC, but it means the timer for unfucking the city just got moved up.”
“Can’t you just hack into the things and disable them or something?”
“The suitcases are lined with some sort of material that makes it difficult to access their systems unless we are right on top of them for direct manipulation,” CORVAC said.
“Translation?” I asked, looking to Natalie.
“The things don’t have any sort of networking capability, so if you want to turn one off you have to flip the switch manually, and there are more suitcases than there is time to turn all of them off the old fashioned way,” Natalie said.
“It would be possible for me to turn them off if they were all in one location,” CORVAC said.