4-11: Something On the Wing

Okay, so I knew this was totally a serious situation, that lives were at stake, but I couldn't help but have a little bit of fun considering CORVAC’s word choice.

"Could I get you to dial that back just a little bit?" I asked.

"Dial what back?" CORVAC asked.

"I need you to repeat what you just told me," I said.

"But mistress," he said. "This is a very serious situation and…"

"I'm also going to need you to go ahead and put it through a voice modifier," I said.

"A voice modifier?" CORVAC asked, sounding more and more incredulous.

Almost as though he was more worried about the gravity of this situation than I was. Though considering I was the one hanging up here at however many thousand feet with a bunch of cats trying to kill me and the only thing keeping me from a nasty fall was the antigravity tech I'd invented…

Well I’d like to think I was very conscious of the gravity of the situation.

“Humor me," I said. "I need you to go ahead and say that again, but this time when you say it I want you to sound like Shatner. Early Shatner. Think the first season of Star Trek. Not late-model Shatner."

"I do not understand how this is going to help the current situation, but if it is what it takes to get you to act then…"

There was a brief pause. So brief that anyone who wasn’t intimately familiar with CORVAC wouldn't have noticed the pause. But I'd been working with him long enough that I knew exactly when he was stopping to think about something. Then a moment later he did it.

"There is something on the wing!"

I devolved into a fit of giggles. I couldn't help myself. It was a spot on Shatner.

"Are you going to tell me what the meaning of this is?" CORVAC asked. "And if you tell me it has something to do with some ridiculous pop culture reference…"

"That's exactly what it has to do with," I said.

I could feel the eye roll. Which he was completely and utterly incapable of doing considering he didn't have eyes to roll.

"Sometimes you are impossible mistress," CORVAC said.

"Can you do it again, but this time make your voice sound like John Lithgow?"

"I am not doing another thing for you unless it has to do with defeating these alien adversaries and attempting to save this flight!"

"Party pooper," I said.

"I am the most advanced artificial intelligence known to human civilization. I will not be used as a parlor trick," he said.

"Fine," I said. "If you're going to get snippy about it…"

I turned back to look at a cat that, sure enough, was up on the wing. It seemed to be having a hell of a time actually getting out to its target, which I was pretty sure was one of the two engines on this side of the massive intercontinental airliner.

The alien controlled cat was fighting for every inch of wing it covered. The thing crawled painstakingly with its claws digging into the metal body fighting the wind whipping around it.

We might be on an emergency course heading back to Starlight City, but that didn't mean the pilots were holding back in the power department.

Luckily for me I didn't have to painstakingly carry myself across that damn wing. No, the technology I had at my disposal was more than capable of taking on the wind keeping this hunk of metal up in the air. 

I adjusted the localized gravity in my boots so down had a little more force than usual so I could walk across the wing without worrying about getting tossed.

It looked a little more awkward than walking normally, it was sort of jerky having my antigravity around the rest of my body fighting the effects of the wind while trying to take normal steps with heightened gravity down by my feet, but I like to think the overall impression was a hell of a lot more impressive than a cat trying to claw its way across the wing to do who knows what to the engine. 

Though I had a few pretty good ideas exactly what its intentions were, and I couldn't believe any of them were good.

As soon as my foot hit the wing the cat realized it had company. Heck, even with the deafening wind it would’ve been hard to miss with the way the whole thing reverberated under my foot. It was a side effect of the increased gravity I was using which was starting to feel like more trouble than it was worth.

The cat turned and its eyes went wide. It even did something that might have been a hiss, but it was difficult to tell considering I couldn't hear a damned thing with all the wind whipping around us.

Though for me that wind was more of a muted buzz. My earpieces were filtering out most of the noise.

I glanced over my shoulder. Saw people pointing and holding up their phones to the viewports.

I rolled my eyes. I was never going to understand the impulse people had to take a picture of the life-threatening situations they found themselves in rather than trying to hide like a sensible person.

Then again it's not like there was going to be any hiding from this situation. Either they were in the air or they weren’t. Maybe they were hoping to get a few good pictures on the off chance they survived.

Heck. They might not even realize they were in any danger considering the only thing they saw was Night Terror trying to rescue a cat that was inexplicably crawling across the wing.

Most people would look at something like that and realize it was impossible for a cat to do what this cat was doing, but the flight was probably full of your average person. And if I'd learned anything in my long villainous career it was that your average person was a complete fucking idiot when it came to what should and shouldn't be.

Particularly when you're talking your average idiot in Starlight City.

I turned back to the cat. “Give it up already!"

The cat turned its head and hissed at me again.

"You have nowhere to go," I said.

I paused to relish the moment. It had been so long since I said anything outright villainous like that. It felt good.

Of course I was well aware that saying something villainous like that usually came right before a villain found themselves being confounded by a hero, but in this case I wasn't sure that either of us were particularly heroic. Which meant I didn’t have to worry about genre tropes biting me in the ass.

"My drones have captured your friends," I said. "If you give up now I promise I won't hurt you much."

"Mistress," CORVAC said, a warning tone to his voice. "We've been working on that. You are not supposed to tell them you are not going to hurt them much. You are supposed to tell them you are not going to hurt them at all and then reveal you were lying once they are in your clutches.”

I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head.

"Right. These guys have annoyed me so much I keep forgetting that part."

That little slip up seemed to be enough to decide my feline adversary’s course of action. It reached down into that thick fur and pulled out a small metallic object. Something that looked like a cross between a ray gun and a sonic screwdriver.

"Shit," I said. "You don't think it's going to try to…"

Only instead of turning the maybe weapon on me the thing pointed down. Towards the nearest engine. It fired a shot and a bolt of something lashed out and slammed into the engine. I felt the jetliner shifting underneath me as the power output changed by about one engine’s worth of thrust.

Well then. That definitely wasn’t one of those mysterious business as usual thunks or bumps that felt like it was something that was about to make a jet fall out of the skies.

Not that this particular intercontinental jetliner was in any danger of falling out of the skies. Not when there were still three other engines. But then a crackling arc of electricity shot out to the other engine on this side. The thing was surrounded and a moment later it was as dead as disco.

I waited for any sort of telltale shift in the plane’s momentum that would tell me the engines on the other side were still working perfectly, but that telltale shift never came.

The plane was gliding so I still felt and heard the wind whipping around me, but the thrum of the engines wasn’t vibrating up through my feet any longer.

Damn. Whatever had taken out the engines on this side must’ve done the same to the other side. Either there was a cat over there, or whatever the thing had fired at the engines on this end had done a number on everything.

Assholes. Once it became clear I was winning they decided they were going to run the whole thing into the ground.

I put my hands on my hips. Shook my head as I looked down at the cat. The only problem with that plan was apparently these alien worm fuckers had never heard of Bernoulli’s principle.

"You really don't know anything about this planet, do you?" I asked. "What is it? The dominant species on your planet discovered antigrav? Is that what's going on?"

That was the one problem with antigrav. If your antigrav engine went out and you didn’t have a backup that meant you went from floating in the air without a care in the world to plummeting to your certain doom.

That wasn’t the case with planes. They could glide along happy as could be provided they were in a situation where they could trade some altitude for time.

The cat hissed again. It even reached out and acted like it was going to try and claw me, but it seemed to think better when it removed one paw from the wing and almost went flying off.

I rolled my eyes and continued walking towards the cat. Sure it probably would've been faster to float over to it, and maybe I could have avoided letting it get that shot off if I hadn’t insisted on walking and being all theatrical, but whatever. 

This plane was still close enough to Starlight City that its glide path would take it well within range of a…

The cat surprised me again by raising its paw. It did a little wave that was surprisingly anthropomorphic for a furry little ball of death. And then it let go. Went flying back as the wind carried its tiny body away.

I followed it with my eyes, wondering what the hell it was doing, and that's when the explosion hit.