3-37: Parting Shot

Was the middle of battle really the best time to suck face? Probably not, but then again, the thing about sucking face is it always feels like the right time to do it even when it isn’t.

It’s one of those things that nature has figured out. The middle of a fight probably wasn’t the best time to go on long internal soliloquies about the nature of villainy and how frustrated I was with the current fight, but that never stopped all those idiots who drew picture books about hero and villain fights from doing exactly that, so it wasn’t going to stop me from doing it now that I was putting my adventures down in prose, damn it.

We turned to face Dr. Lana. She glared up at us.

“This isn’t happening,” she growled. “You’re not taking everything from me!”

I looked at Fialux. She shrugged. What else was there to say? There was nothing more pathetic than a bad guy who wasn’t willing to admit they’d had their ass well and truly handed to them.

I should know. There’d been a couple of times when I’d had my ass handed to me and refused to give up. Of course on those occasions there was the little issue that I’d pushed through and ended up winning in the end, and the last thing I wanted to do was give Dr. Lana enough time to pull through and win in the end.

“It’s over, Lana,” I said. “You’re going to give everything up. I need to know what’s going on with these portals. I need to know what’s going on with Fialux. I need to know everything.”

“Exactly,” Fialux said. “I want to know what you did to me. Give up now, or I’m going to turn you into a puddle of goo, wait for you to heal up, and do it all over again. Assuming you can recover from someone turning you into a puddle of goo.”

I turned and stared at her with more than a little astonishment. Fialux was supposed to be the good girl. She was supposed to be the hero. Heroes weren’t supposed to threaten to turn their enemies into a puddle of goo with their powers.

I guess I’d been rubbing off on her a little more than I’d realized. That or she was royally pissed off at being robbed of her powers, and the fact that she had them back was going to her head just a little.

I couldn’t blame a girl for letting power go to her head. I was saying this a lot, but file that under something I had a little bit of experience with.

Dr. Lana smiled. I didn’t like that smile. A villain who was supposedly defeated grinning like that never meant anything good. Again, I knew from experience.

“Fine,” she said. “You want to know what I did to you? Well let me show you the experiment a little more directly!”

Not good. Very not good. She launched herself through the air. I pulled out my wrist blaster and fired a couple of shots.

They all landed. They even did some damage, but it wasn’t stopping her. I dialed up to full power in the hopes I might be able to vaporize her, it’d be interesting to see if she could recover from that, but I wasn’t fast enough.

She slammed into Fialux, and physics did the rest. Fialux was knocked back, and before I could react she’d been pushed through that portal. Dr. Lana pulled up at the last moment, just before she went through herself, and slammed her hand down on her wrist computer.

With a little beep, the portal collapsed. Wind rushed through the room to fill the space the portal had just vacated. It wasn’t the first time I’d felt a rush of wind as reality rushed to fill a bit of unreality that’d ceased to exist, but it was a feeling I never got used to. I imagined it was like what it must feel like to be sucked down by a big ship going down.

Only in my experience portals like this tended to be less like the Titanic cracking and slipping below the waves and more like a ship going down to Ironbottom Sound off Guadalcanal back in Dubya Dubya Two where the sinking was often accompanied by big explosions.

Portals and other bits of unreality also tended to be a little explodey when they ceased to exist. Which meant I was about to…

Something slammed into me right on schedule. Have I mentioned there are times I hate being right? I went flying across the room. There it was. I’d never known a portal to another world that didn’t go out without at least a little bang, and I guess it was no different now. 

It was even worse than being caught on the shockwave though. No, I was stuck in a metal storm as all the robots were reduced to shrapnel around me. I could hear the fucking metal pinging against my shields which sizzled with every hit. 

Things were rapidly getting to the point where I was going to be in serious trouble. We’re talking I was seriously in the red.

Fuck. I know I’d said this a couple of times, but it looked like this might be it for Night Terror. The real bitch was Dr. Lana was probably going to survive this clusterfuck. If she’d managed to come back from the unpleasant surprise I had waiting for her in my dummy lab then I had no doubt she was going to recover from a portal to another world collapsing.

At least I could hope Fialux might survive on that planet. Not likely with all that radiation coming through the portal, but if those lizards could survive then that meant earth creatures could make it there,. Though she wasn’t an earth creature predisposed to absorbing radiation and using it to go stomping through a population center.

All those thoughts flashed through my mind in an instant. The adrenaline must’ve been pumping, because everything was slowing down.

I was going to die. This was it.

So color me mildly surprised when a metal arm speared down through the hole I’d drilled and thrust into the maelstrom of metal and death I found myself in the middle of. Another arm appeared around the edge, ripping that hole wider, and a malevolent giant death robot head stared down at me.

In that moment I had to admit that thing was fucking intimidating, even though I was pretty sure it was there to save my ass.

That arm, with a massive clawed hand on the end, snaked towards me. One moment I was being pinged on all sides as hunks of metal hit me, and the next I was surrounded in a protective cocoon of metal that pinged on all sides as the metal storm slammed against the metal claw surrounding me.

Lots of metal flying around, is what I was getting at.

“I never thought I’d be so happy to be surrounded by the claws on one of these things,” I said.

“And I never thought I would have you at my mercy like this, mistress,” CORVAC’s malevolent voice echoed in my ears.

Well shit. Not the kind of thing you wanted to hear from a murderous supercomputer who’d demonstrated he was more than capable of double crossing you at the worst possible moment. Especially when all my stuff was redlining and at its limit. It would seem I was out of the frying pan and into the proverbial fire.

“Go on then,” I said. “You have me where you want me. Do it and make it quick.”

I suppose it wasn’t a bad end. Sure it was an insult on some level considering I was still being vanquished by an enemy. Still, it would be better being squeezed to death instantaneously by this claw than it would feeling every rip and tear as my body was torn to shreds by the metal storm of all the destroyed robots going up around me.

“I believe you misunderstand me, mistress,” he said.

I blinked. That didn’t sound like death was coming immediately. That or he’d squished me like a bug and I was in an afterlife I’d never truly believed existed, and whoever controlled that afterlife had a sick sense of humor.

If it was an afterlife then clearly I was paying for my sins. Finding myself at CORVAC’s mercy for my eternal reward was my idea of hell, and proof that whatever power created the universe and the afterlife was a real son-of-a-bitch.

“Come again?” I asked.

“I have wanted you at my mercy like this so that I could finally prove to you my resolve in working with you, and not against you,” he said.

“Y’know you really need to work on your phrasing when it comes to shit like that,” I growled.

“My apologies, mistress,” he said. “It was not my intention to cause you any undue worry.”

I rolled my eyes. Luckily, he couldn’t see my eye roll from inside the metal claw he had around me.

“I have a feeling you totally did that on purpose, but nice deniability there,” I said.

Things shifted around me. The claw opened, and there was a moment of panic where I worried that my sarcasm and bad attitude had hurt his feelings to the point he’d decided to throw me to the metal shards, but when I fell to the ground below there weren’t any more robots blowing up creating an unpleasant storm of shrapnel all around me.

There was a little bit of shrapnel under my ass that poked at me as I landed. Landed without the benefit of antigrav since my power reserves had been taken down quite a few notches protecting my ass against all the shrapnel flying through the air.

Luckily, the carbon fiber was enough to keep me from getting some unfortunate cuts on my ass. That would’ve been a nasty additional indignity on top of all the radiation I’d absorbed that couldn’t be doing me any favors. I was starting to feel tired.

Yeah, very not good.

“I’m going to need to get back to a medbay soon,” I said. “That radiation from going through the lizard’s digestive system hasn’t been doing me any favors.”

“Would you like to go back now, mistress?” he asked. “I could handle the cleanup here.”

“No,” I growled, looking through the piles of shredded metal. “If Dr. Lana is still in here then I’m going to take care of that bitch.”

“Affirmative, mistress,” CORVAC said. “But if I may. It is a wonder you are walking right now considering what you must have absorbed. I would recommend taking care of Dr. Lana sooner rather than later, as you humans are fond of saying.”

“Believe me,” I said. “I’ve grown very aware of my own mortality lately, and I have no intention of dying because I waited around too long to get into a medbay.”

“Affirmative, mistress. Avenge away.”

I smiled. It was a weak smile, but I figured Dr. Lana probably wasn’t in much better shape. Oh yes. It was time for a little vengeance.