by Mia Archer
I blinked a couple of times in confusion and then grabbed the new arrival by the tail fin. It looked like an old style World War II era bomb.
“What the hell is this?” I asked.
“A replica of Fat Man,” Natalie said. “We didn’t have time for the 3D Printers to fabricate something as big as the bomb from Dr. Strangelove, but I figured this would do in a pinch.”
I grinned. “You always get me the best presents.”
“I know darling,” she said. “Now why don’t you pass on my present to its intended recipient?”
“On it.”
So I hopped on the thing and let gravity take over. The bomb dropped, with me on top riding it like a bucking bronco and screaming at the top of my lungs.
"It's a damn shame you didn't give me a cowboy hat to go along with this moment," I said.
"So sorry for disappointing you," Natalie said, her voice the sort of neutral that said she was barely holding back the sarcasm.
Again I smiled. Again I could almost imagine her rolling her eyes as she said it. I looked up at the sky above moving away from me at a not so rapid pace even as I knew the ground beneath me was rushing up to meet me pretty fucking fast.
I cackled in glee.
“Damn it feels good to be a villain!" I shouted at the top of my lungs.
"It warms my heart to hear you say…"
Whatever Natalie said was cut off. Bright light filled my eyes. Then a loud ringing hit my ears as I was tossed around and slammed into things even as other things slammed into me through the nuclear maelstrom.
I blinked a couple of times. My eyesight recovered fairly rapidly, but I guess being at the hypocenter of a nuclear explosion wasn't the kind of thing that even my body could take without a little bit of correction, for all that I’d survived.
I was probably the first person in the history of history to stand at the center of a nuclear explosion and watch as it happened.
My vision slowly returned and I could see some shadows that were obviously poor motherfuckers who'd elected to stay behind and had been scrambling to get the fuck away from the crazy superheroine turned villain riding the bomb straight down onto their heads like something out of Stanley Kubrick's craziest fever dreams, but the fact that they were nothing but shadows permanently etched into the pavement was proof there was no running from this.
Military equipment was tossed around me like a giant was having a tantrum while playing with his toys. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say they were being tossed around like me when I got good and pissed off at military types.
Either way, it was a sight to behold as I floated in the middle of it buffeted by nuclear fire. It was a reminder that there were terrible forces in the world. Forces that humanity had managed to master, to a point. Forces that still weren’t enough to take me on, for all that they were the most powerful forces humanity had managed to come up with outside of Natalie’s toys in her lab.
I grinned the sort of grin that probably would’ve been deeply unsettling to even Natalie if she could have survived the center of a nuclear explosion to see that grin.
Or maybe she would’ve been turned on by that grin. Who knows. She did seem to enjoy it when I started getting all villainous, after all.
The point is, that grin contained the end of the world as people here on earth knew it.
I flew up and out of the cloud. A massive roiling mushroom cloud. Heat and wind buffeted me on all sides, but I didn't care. Finally I broke free and saw blue sky above, though there were no fluffy white clouds since they’d all been blown away by all the nuclear weapons going off.
I threw my head back and laughed. Talk about a rush! If this is what it felt like to act like a villain then I was really starting to understand what the fuck Natalie had been going on about all this time!
Then I stopped. Frowned as I looked all around. The entirety of Starlight City and most of suburbs were surrounded by radioactive mushroom clouds. It wouldn’t be long before those radioactive clouds turned to fallout. I’d read all about it in high school when we had to read a book about Hiroshima, and I didn't want to save my fucking city only to have everybody down there irradiated.
Not to mention I'd had enough trouble with giant irradiated monsters. I didn't want to think about what might happen if some of that fallout got to the dump where the reptiles who occasionally came into contact with radioactive material that’d been illegally dumped by some asshole Starlight Citizen made their home.
No thank you. Dealing with them on that strange new world had been bad enough. I didn’t want to deal with them again back here on earth.
It was time to do some environmental cleanup. Only before I could do that something came streaking out of the city towards me. Something that shimmered. I worried that maybe there’d been some secret weapon left behind by the military or Dr. Lana or someone who had a contingency in place for nukes going off on, in, or around the city, but that shimmering resolved to Natalie surrounded by a shield that had been turned up past eleven.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"I'm coming out here to make sure you're okay," Natalie said. She held up her wrist computer and her eyes went wide. “Fuck! You're more radioactive than Godzilla visiting Fukushima!"
"Is that bad?" I asked.
"That depends on how radioactive you are after we hose you down," she said. “I’m seriously hoping this isn’t a situation where no one can approach you for a few hundred years, because it’s sort of been awhile and…”
"Whatever," I said, holding up a hand to stop her before she started describing things that would have me distracted from the important business at hand. "Right now we have bigger problems."
"You're telling me," Natalie said. "Would you take a look at all those mushroom clouds! That’s gonna play hell with cancer statistics for years!”
"Not if I take care of it," I said.
"What could you possibly do to take care of it?" Natalie asked.
I thought back to a different fight against a giant monster. A giant monster that hadn't been irradiated, but it’d certainly been terrifying taking that motherfucker on considering it was made up of a shitload of mind controlling worms. I looked to Natalie. Grinned.
"It's time to have a hero made natural disaster."
"What are you…"
"You need to get away," I said. "Because I can't guarantee your safety."
27
Unnatural Disasters
“If you think there’s a chance in hell I’m leaving you alone while you fight the good fight out here then you have another thing coming,” Natalie said.
“How powerful are those shields anyway?” I asked.
“Powerful enough that I could take you on for a good little while,” she said. “So don’t think for a moment you’re going to get rid of me that easily. I’m not afraid of the radiation and…”
Whatever she was about to say disappeared along with her. I shook out my fist. The tingling when it’d made contact with her gut had been a little weird, but nothing I wasn’t used to given all the times we’d gone toe-to-toe.
“You bitch!” she screamed into my earpiece.
“Yeah, I wasn’t worried about whether or not your shields could stand up to radiation,” I said. “I just wanted to make sure that if I punched you it wouldn’t do permanent damage.”
There was cursing followed by a thump and more crashing. I squinted and saw Natalie crashing through one of the buildings in downtown Starlight City. Part of it came down around her, but I wasn’t worried about people hanging out on the top levels of some of the skyscrapers downtown given everything that’d happened so far.
“Sorry,” I said. “But this is something I need to do on my own. I wasn’t bullshitting when I said this was going to be dangerous.”
“I’m going to show you dangerous when I get out of here!” she shouted. “CORVAC! I need you to get out there and stop her from whatever the hell she’s about to do!”
“You’ll forg
ive me if I’m not eager to take on the super powered being who has proved to be my better and yours when it comes to these fights,” CORVAC said.
“Good bot,” I said as I flew through the mushroom clouds on the outskirts of Starlight City.
I picked up speed as I curved around and around the first cloud. The wind whipped around me and I threw my head back and let out a triumphant laugh.
Sure enough it was starting to work just the same as it had on a strange desert world orbiting some triple star system out in the middle of who knew where. The city back there had been on fire for a completely different reason, but whatever. The point was I’d been here before, and I knew what I was doing.
It picked up to the point that I was in the middle of a radioactive funnel cloud. Which sounded like the sort of thing that would’ve been straight out of the nightmares of a science fiction author, but I planned on using this funnel cloud to do a bit of cleanup before all the radioactive shit that was pumping into the upper atmosphere could really do some damage.
“Are you seriously trying to create a radioactive tornado?” Natalie said. “Because of all the weather things I don’t want to see visited on my city that’s probably at the top of the list.”
“You don’t get a choice in what happens here,” I said.
I started moving the thing. It was difficult at first, but the more I did this the more I got used to it. Let’s just say it was a good I’d learned how to do this in a city on a world I didn’t care about as much as I cared about Starlight City back here on earth.
The radioactive tornado went slowly at first, but the more I flew around and around the more I got used to it and the easier it was to move the massive radioactive tornado on a path of destruction around the edges of the city. The thing grew with every mushroom cloud I flew into, and it got more and more difficult to control as more heat was added.
It was a literal firestorm in every sense of the word.
“Did you ever stop to think about what might happen if you lose control of your radioactive firestorm dear?” Natalie asked.
I could tell she was gritting her teeth, but I didn’t care. The time and the place to worry about this was before I started. All I could do now was worry about how the hell I was going to control this.
“CORVAC!” Natalie said. “I need you to get the dornes ready to set up one hell of a shield wall!”
“Affirmative, mistress,” he said. “Diverting the drones that were assisting with recovery efforts now.”
I gritted my own teeth as I kept moving. It was difficult to tell exactly where I was going since I was now only getting the occasional glimpse of the outside world as I continued spinning around and around, but I figured I’d picked up at least half of the clouds at this point.
“What are you doing with those drones?” I asked. “And how the hell could you possibly have enough of the things to cover the whole city?”
“Let’s just say I’ve been busy mass producing some toys in my new lab in anticipation of fighting your new friends,” she said. “This isn’t exactly what I was planning, but I figure it’s a damn good thing I have those toys ready to go considering the dumbass shit you’re pulling right now.”
“Love you too, baby,” I said.
I was met with more growling that I promptly ignored.
“Almost there,” I growled.
“Have you thought of what you’re going to do with this radioactive supercyclone you’re creating when you’ve gathered up all the mushroom clouds?” Natalie asked.
“I’m going up,” I said.
“You’re going up,” Natalie said. “Into the upper atmosphere where you can distribute that stuff over an even greater area instead of having it localized where it’s gonna cause some radiation sickness in the city?”
“Easy for you to say when you’re hiding behind shields that will save your ass from that sort of thing,” I said.
“Yes, it is quite easy for me to say that,” she said. “I’m surprised I still have to explain the concept of a villain lacking a conscience to you at this point.”
“I’m right there with you,” I said. “But I’m still not going to let the people in Starlight City die because of a plan we put together.”
“Admirable,” Natalie said. “Could you shift that cloud of yours a little closer to the city now?”
I blinked. “You want me to move the scary radioactive cloud you were just bitching about closer to the city?”
“Well yeah,” she said. “I can’t do my part of the plan if you don’t move the scary radioactive cloud closer to the city, so I’d be much obliged if you’d let me do the evil planning.”
“Right,” I said. “You’ve got the brains and I’ve got the looks? That’s how it’s going to be?”
“Honestly I’m more inclined to think we both have the looks, but I do have the evil plan right now and you have the giant radioactive fire tornado so could you please just listen and stop talking? It’s hard to hear you with all the radiation interference on top of the wind.”
“Right,” I said. “Moving closer to the city. I hope you know what the fuck you’re doing.”
“I always know what the fuck I’m doing, thank you very much,” she said with a sniff that let me know just what she thought of my doubts.
So I angled the massive supercyclone towards the city. Something shimmered in the distance. Something that was sloped up and over the city.
“If you’d be so kind, please ride this shield ramp,” Natalie said.
“What happens when it gets over the city?” I asked. “This seems like the last place we should be ramping a radioactive firestorm.”
“Never you mind,” she said. “Just get it the fuck up there.”
I could see that the shimmering wall of shielding she’d created wasn’t exactly just hanging there. No, there were thousands, maybe millions, of little black points hovering below generating the shields. Those must be the drones she was talking about. I didn’t know she could do that with her drones, and it was pretty impressive.
“And now for the magic,” Natalie said.
The shielding started to move up and around me. Like all those drones were closing in to create a massive sphere.
“This might be a good time for you to get the hell out of there, by the way,” Natalie said. “Like if you could fly straight up right about now it’d be a really big help.”
I shot straight up, and only a little puff of the radioactive cloud followed me as drones moved in to close the shield behind me and the whole intense cyclone was contained in that shielding while drones wrapped around it creating a sphere surrounding said angry cloud.
“Now wasn’t that easy?” Natalie said.
“Easy?” I said. “What part of that looked easy?”
“Okay, so maybe it wasn’t easy,” she said. “But it does mean I can do this now that everything is contained in the shielding. CORVAC, would you do the honors?”
A shimmering sparkle appeared from within the sphere. It seemed to spark a couple of times, lightning flashed out from it, and then a moment later the entire maelstrom was gone.
“Huh,” Natalie said. “I can’t believe that actually worked!”
“What’d you do?” I asked.
“Teleported it into a pattern buffer,” she said.
“A pattern buffer,” I said.
“Yeah, it’s where I store stuff that’s been teleported while I’m trying to figure out what to do with it. I figure having a giant angry storm of radioactive material at my beck and call might make for a useful weapon at some point.”
“You totally stole that idea from Star Trek,” I said, a slightly accusatory note coming to my voice.
“So you recognize Star Trek references now?” Natalie said, sounding ecstatic. “You have no idea how happy that makes me. And maybe I stole the name, but I was the one who invented the technology. Being a nerd who came up with an idea back in the late ‘80s doesn’t mean you get to patent that idea if you can’t actu
ally figure out how to make it work. It’s not like the Roddenberry estate got residuals from Motorola when flip phones became a thing.”
“And I’m sure the fact that you can show up on the Paramount lot and start firing plasma blasts at anyone who tries to sue you has nothing to do with why you haven’t gotten a cease and desist yet,” I said.
“Hey, that restraining order William Shatner took out against me is totally baseless,” she said.
“The what?” I asked.
“It’s also the reason I stay away from that lot,” she said. “You don’t mess with Shatner.”
“What are you even talking about?” I asked.
“Nothing you need to worry about as long as you stay away from him,” she said. “Now get your ass down here so I can hose you off and make out with you!”
I grinned and looked down at the city. “I think that’s the first truly genius idea you’ve come up with today!”
28
The End?
We floated over a rapidly rebuilding Starlight City. It was the middle of the night, but there was still the occasional light kicking up from the flare of artillery shells hitting the shield wall in the distance to add to the lights of new construction down below.
New construction that was going a hell of a lot faster thanks to help from my new alien friends and Natalie’s automated armies she’d been intending to use to destroy.
“You think they’re ever going to get tired of doing that?” I asked.
“Not as long as they think they can get through and kick our ass,” Natalie said. “You really pissed them off when you took out a good chunk of the military’s operating capacity on the home front.”
“Should’ve thought about that before they started trying to vivisect copies of me,” I said.
“Makes for some pretty lighting though,” she said.
“Not as pretty as the lights in the city,” I said, smiling as I looked down over a Starlight City that was finally starting to look like the lights that’d originally given the place its namesake so long ago.