4-12: Heroic Rescue

My first indication that something had gone terribly wrong was when I found myself flat against a window looking at some very confused tourist types snapping pictures with their phones.

Idiots. The plane just literally exploded and they were taking pictures?

I peeled myself off of the window and looked at the wing. Or rather I looked at where the wing had been. At this point it was more of a gaping hole that was quickly becoming a huge gaping hole as the wind moved through the thing and ripped more pieces away.

“Fuck,” I said.

A drone flew over the hole. Clearly CORVAC was getting a look at things, and from the noises he was making over the comm line it didn’t sound like things looked good.

“No chance of saving it?” I asked.

“Signs point to no, mistress,” he said.

I looked back at the window. Some of the people in there were starting to realize that maybe they were more fucked than they’d imagined.

Maybe my face pressed up against the window had blocked the view of certain death.

"Now that's quite the conundrum," I said.

"What is that mistress?" CORVAC asked.

"If I let this plane go down with all hands then I don't have to worry about any of those embarrassing photos of me with my face up against the window getting out onto the Internet," I said. "That's almost worth letting this thing go down."

That and those idiot pilots. If they'd listened to me then none of this would have happened. I could’ve rounded up the cats safely on the ground once they landed. 

But no. They decided they weren’t going to listen to me. They decided they were going to laugh at me. And now look at what was happening!

I know. I was totally doing the “they laughed at me” internal villain monologue, but if there was ever a time when that monologue was justified then it was now!

"You know you are not going to do that mistress," CORVAC said.

"Really?" I asked. "Why not?"

"For the simple fact that there is always the risk someone on that flight will be able to upload the picture through the plane’s Wi-Fi. If the world finds out you were on this plane, particularly if you were outside the plane on a wing that blew up under mysterious circumstances, and it goes down then naturally the blame is going to fall on you."

I frowned. "I forgot about in-flight Wi-Fi."

"And I am certain the people on that plane would not mind paying the exorbitant fees that are involved in getting that Wi-Fi if they think their end is nigh and they will never have to pay the bill."

"Damn you CORVAC,” I muttered.

"I aim to please, mistress," he said.

"Well I'm not very pleased now."

"On the bright side, I have managed to acquire the cat that used the device. Unfortunately it appears that it dropped whatever it used to blow up the engines so we will be unable to determine where they are procuring their technology.”

"Well damn," I said.

I floated over for a closer inspection of the damage. I wasn't all that experienced with flying fixed wing aircraft. 

Still. It didn't take a rocket surgeon to figure out there was something seriously wrong with this plane’s wing. Even as I watched the hole grew wide enough that a big chunk of the wing tore away and went floating off into the distance.

"Damn," I said. "This plane doesn't have long."

As though to confirm and mock me at the same time the rest of the wing chose that moment to rip off completely. I hit the chunks with an anti-Newtonian field since we were over the city now. I didn’t want that hitting anyone down there.

"I concur mistress," CORVAC said with his usual gift for understatement.

“Okay then,” I said. “We just went from a bad situation to shit getting real pretty fucking fast. How are we going to do this?”

There was another shudder that moved through the airframe followed by the squeal of metal.

“Was that the other wing?” I asked.

“Aff…”

CORVAC didn’t get a chance to tell me whether or not that was the other wing before it became very apparent that it was, in fact, the sound of the other wing being torn off. Because it tore off and flew right into the rear rudder thingy. Whatever the hell they called it.

Again, I wasn’t exactly big on flying the friendly skies in anything with fixed wings, so I’d never bothered to learn the technical terms.

The plane chose that moment to go tearing away from me. I stared at it as it plummeted down towards Starlight City. Because apparently the pilots in their infinite wisdom had decided to go on a glide path that took them right over downtown Starlight City.

Of course they did. Everything interesting always happened right over downtown Starlight City. Which meant the plane was now a flaming missile heading straight down for the tallest buildings in the city at hundreds of miles an hour.

“Son of a bitch,” I said. “I’m gonna need an assist on this one. How good are those new toys of yours at heavy lifting?”

“I suppose we will find out, mistress,” CORVAC said.

I dove for the plane. Another nice thing about relying on antigrav was I was able to move faster than your standard 9.8m/s which was a good thing considering I was chasing after something that was moving a hell of a lot faster than that.

Fuck. I had no idea how I was going to do this. This was the sort of thing that was more a Fialux deal, but of course she wasn’t around because she’d been teleported to whatever the hell radioactive hellscape these alien worms came from and I had no way of figuring out where the fuck that was so I could mount a rescue.

Another pang hit me. Remorse. Loss. Grief. The desire to scream and sob and over all of that was anger. Mostly at myself for letting that happen to her.

I poured that anger into this. I would do what Fialux would do. I was going to save this plane, and then I was going to extricate each and every cat I could find from the fucker and make the worms living inside them wish they’d never been born.

Assuming they were born. For all I knew they developed from spores or were grown in the shit their hosts excreted. Parasitic worms tended to have funky lifecycles.

There was another explosion. I worried that the whole thing was going to go up. The thing was trailing fuel of some sort, and I figured the flight was probably loaded up with the stuff considering it had been departing Starlight City.

So I improvised. I fired off a couple of anti-Newtonian bubbles at the spots where the fuel was leaking.

That slowed the leak to a crawl. I had no idea how the anti-Newtonian field would work on jet fuel, but I had to hope it would be enough to keep it from blowing up with an earth-shattering kaboom while I was in its vicinity.

A girl could hope. Knowing the way my luck had been running lately I wasn’t exactly holding my breath.

“Come on,” I said. “There has to be some way to take care of this.”

I looked down. We were getting awfully close to some major buildings. In fact the plane was going to slam into one of them pretty damn quick if I didn’t do something about it.

So I moved down to the nose and punched it. Sure a normal person wouldn’t be able to punch through that metal, but I was anything but a normal person with the enhancements I was running.

I pulled the plane up by the nose and it just barely cleared the building. That went well enough that I figured I would just try to lift the whole damn thing.

After all. I had the power. If I could throw down with giant robots and giant monsters and a living goddess like Fialux and live to tell the tale then something as simple as lifting a jet doing its best impression of a guided missile should’ve been child’s play.

I screamed as I pushed the antigrav as hard as it would go. I felt the plane nosing up and the momentum even helped me just a little. We skirted over the tops of a couple of buildings that would’ve been having a very bad day if I wasn’t there to keep this plane up, but then of course physics came into the equation and flipped me the bird.

The problem wasn’t with anything I did. No, the problem was entirely on the plane’s design.

It turns out an airframe designed for flight wasn’t all that great when it came to having a single super powered individual trying to lift it. The practical upshot being the point where I was holding onto the damn thing quickly became a point of failure as the stress of the plane’s fantastic speed coupled with my lifting became too much.

That’s a fancy way of saying the plane broke apart in my hands. One moment I had my hands buried in the nose holding the damn thing up and the next moment the nose shattered around me and bits of plane shrapnel went flying down to the city below.

I fired off a couple more shots from the old anti-Newtonian field in the hopes that might do something to stop the plane from hurtling through the air, but of course the anti-Newtonian bubbles I had attached to my wrist blaster were designed to work with objects that were a hell of a lot smaller than a plane.

Otherwise we would’ve been gravy. If they could stop Fialux they could stop a plane. I’d just never envisioned having to create a bubble that big.

Fuck. Fuckity fuck!

I finally saw my opportunity in a great green open area. Starlight City Park. Not the best place to put a plane down under any circumstances, but I figured it was better than the plane crashing into a building.

“I have a feeling this is going to be a bumpy landing,” I growled.

“Affirmative, mistress,” CORVAC said.

Still, I had no choice. I could hang out just below the plane and bitch all about how I shouldn’t have to do this kind of shit, or I could do something about it. So I moved under the plane, slammed into the belly, and lifted with all my might. Hopefully I’d be able to slow this down just enough that slamming into those trees wouldn’t do too much damage.

I knew it was only a matter of time before the plane busted around this point of failure too. The people who designed the thing hadn’t conceived of a situation where the whole flight might be saved by a single individual trying to lift the whole damn plane from one spot.

Though with the number of rescues along those lines that happened on the regular in Starlight City you’d think engineers would start building those stress tolerances into their damn plane. Was one handhold along the bottom of a plane too much to ask?

I felt the metal buckle, and that’s when I saw another problem dead ahead. A bunch of people gathered for a festival or a parade of some sort. I couldn’t tell what it was at this distance, but I’d just pointed this damn plane at that gathering.

I guess I could still take comfort in the knowledge that it was going to be a hell of a lot less populated than, say, slamming into the side of a building, but hitting that crowd would still suck big time.

Damn it. So much for trying to save the day.