“The sad thing is, whatever passes for your intelligence can’t even realize how lopsided this battle is,” Minerva said, getting into a ready stance. “It’s not even a real fight. I could take you all out with a blink of my eye.”
She held the pose, but with a sweep of her gaze a wave of crackling energy cut across the battlefield, bisecting the taller individuals among the droids.
“Or, in a blink of yours.”
To an outside viewer, she seemed to flicker briefly out of view at the same time that several of the largest remaining probe bots explodes in showers of parts.
The assembled assemblages had made no move to swarm over her during this bit of grandstanding. It would hardly have mattered what they did, but they were being oddly respectful of her dramatic moment.
“As satisfying as it is to take a few of you bastards apart, what I really need tonight is a bit of a workout,” the heroine said. “So we’re doing this Marquess of Queensberry style… no speed, no lightning eyes… and no chance for you.”
With that, she launched herself into action, using her entire body as a weapon. Her right hand speared through a computer casing torso, ripping apart the spiderweb tangle of processors and hard drives inside. Her left hand shot out to the side to snap a sledgehammer limb off of another bot. She twirled this weighty implement like a baton, pulping plastic, shattering aluminum, and twisting steel.
She deflected projectiles such as buzz saws and sharpened bits of metal piping without thinking. One circular blade she batted aside ended up taking off the head of a robot emerging from the storm drain before burying itself in the brickwork of a nearby building.
When one of the machines grabbed on to her weapon, she rocked backward and yanked its arms off at the shoulders, then threw the whole thing aside. She didn’t really need a weapon, after all, any more than she would have needed her superspeed or electro eyes.
These were neither the original probe bodies that had landed millennia ago with advanced alien technology, nor the sophisticated models that had menaced the world with the greatest supertechnology the most brilliant minds of the 1980s had been able to muster.
These were simply the first generation children of the survivors of that group, cobbled together from whatever scraps they could get their hands on without attracting too much attention. They were no match for her strength and fury, and had no weapons capable of breaking her skin.
That wasn’t to say that they didn’t get some good hits in.
Three pellets slammed into her face, bursting and splattering viscous, fluorescent pink paint over her eyes. She cried out in irritation. Metal fists and implements slammed into her body. She went into a spin, her fists flung out wide… and maybe she cheated on the “no speed” rule just a bit, but the larger opponents were battered to pieces and the smaller ones were flung away.
With some space cleared, she turned on the juice in her eyes a bit and the paint sizzled away. She looked and saw a probe that had a paintball gun with a webcam scope on an adjustable tripod, in the spot where a head might otherwise have gone.
Giving a fierce growl, she snatched up the fallen sledgehammer, spun around, and threw it. It smashed the gun-head to pieces and continued on, going through the plate glass window of an electronics store and destroying a giant plasma TV on display there.
“Aw, biscuits,” Minerva said. The tiniest of the swarming robots, which continued to spill up from the sewers, immediately diverted away from the fight to climb through the shattered storefront. “I hope they have supercrime insurance.”
Knowing that she would have set off a silent alarm, Minerva grabbed the cell phone off her hip holster and speedialed the police 4B contact line so they’d know not to send out a patrol car, using acrobatic kicks to take out a few more bots and keep the rest back away from her while the call went through.
A tiny, roughly spherical bot with arms/legs ending in pincers jutting out from all over it jumped up and caught hold of her boot as she was snap kicking one of its larger brethren in its cuckoo clock face. She yelped in surprise and went to shake it off, but it swung itself up and over her leg, sailing past her ear and taking her cell with it.
“Oh, hell,” Minerva said.
She tracked the skittering construct as it darted away through the horde of robots. It propelled itself by rolling, pushing off with one limb and passing the phone from hand to hand so that it was always on top. She saw where the thing was heading and then took off after it, jumping and skipping past the slow-to-react probes that grabbed or swiped or fired improvised harpoons at her moments after she was passed. She reached down to scoop up the phone, but the round little bot zigged when she expected it to zag and her fingers closed on air.
When she closed out the sound of clicking, clacking, and clanking all around her, she could hear the voice on the other end: “Ms. Wisdom, are you there? Hello? Do you require assistance? Hello?” This was followed by a brief pause, and then, “Is this Claire?”
Minerva gave a little growl and then, applying just a touch of speed, she lunged for her phone. A moment before she reached it, the multi-handed bot pulled the phone apart and threw the pieces to other nearby bots.
“I just figured out how to do email on that!” she said as the wind picked up around them, making her short cape and skirt flutter dramatically. “That’s it, guys… the gloves are coming off.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” a stern female voice said from above as the wind continued to beat down like the wash from helicopter blades. “You of all people should know these things aren’t to be trifled with.”
“Siren,” Minerva said, looking up and acknowledging the other woman held aloft on the swirling winds which filled the billowing cape attached to her arms.
“Minerva,” Storm Siren replied. A sharpened rebar spear and several heavy chunks of scrap metal were launched at her from below, only to be swept off course by a sudden gale-force gust. “Let’s wrap this up. You sweep the street, I’ll take care of the shop.”
“Right,” Minerva said.
When Minerva went fully into her superspeed, it was over in objective moments… from her point of view, all but the fastest of the bots were standing completely still. They might have had the processing power to perceive things faster than humans, but their improvised locomotion systems and patched-together joints couldn’t begin to move at the speed necessary to defend against her.
In the time it took Storm Siren to move into position and channel her lightning through every bit of electrically conductive material in the Evco Electronics Superstore, she’d smashed or disassembled every single one of the bots… every one but the multi-armed roller that had stolen her phone. She severed the connection to its battery pack with a precision blast from her eyes.
“Overkill, much?” Minerva said to Storm Siren when she’d finished. Acrid blue smoke and a heavy smell of ozone was pouring out from the store’s ruined window.
“Better than letting them get away with an entire store’s worth of high-end consumer electronics. Of course, if they hadn’t called attention to themselves first, they could have infiltrated the store and carried off as much as they wanted before the police had a chance to respond.”
“Yeah, nobody ever accused the probes of being geniuses,” Minerva said, tossing and catching the deactivated spheroid.
“On the contrary,” Storm Siren said. “They managed to maintain themselves undetected throughout all of human history, following their directive to influence the development of technology that would aid their masters’ plan. Even after suffering a crushing defeat, they survived to rebuild themselves and even increase their numbers…”
“Will this train of thought be pulling into a station any time soon?”
“Yes,” Storm Siren said. “These robots had some other goal, some purpose so compelling as to make them throw caution to the wind and make themselves clearly visible to anybody passing by. The electronic store must have simply been a target of opportunity.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s true,” Minerva said. “They didn’t show any interest in the store until I, uh… until the window got smashed, actually.”
“Interesting. How did you happen upon them, exactly?”
“Just got lucky,” Minerva said. “I was doing a run-through of the city and they caught my eye popping up out of the ground.”
“Hmm,” Storm Siren said, frowning. The micro-maelstrom of wind around her began to fade and then disappeared entirely as her feet gently touched the ground. “Assuming that the timing was not a coincidence… and I see no reason to believe it would be… this leaves us with the question: why choose to reveal themselves en masse to a person who has both the motive and the ability to destroy them utterly?”
“I don’t know… assisted self-destruct protocol?” Minerva mused. “Anyway, not that I’m not grateful for the assist… but I thought you didn’t respond to Evco alarms.”
“I wasn’t here for the alarm,” she said. “Your sister asked me to keep an eye out for you.”
“She could have called if she wanted to get in… oh, you mean to keep an eye on me,” Minerva said, her demeanor going icy. Storm Siren said nothing, but looked at her impassively. “Damn it, Athena!” Minerva said to the sky. “You’ve got the whole rest of the world to play ‘mommy’ with. You don’t need to do it to me.”
“Considering that by the time I caught up to you, you were letting a bunch of those mechanical tumors waltz all over you, I think her concern was valid,” Siren said.
“I could have ended it at any time,” Minerva said, turning away.
“That’s why it’s troubling that you didn’t,” Storm Siren said. “Oh, turning your back on me is really going to…”
“Hey, what?” Minerva said, stooping down. A glimpse of glittering color among the robot rubble had caught her eye. “I know this chain,” she said, pulling free a slightly tarnished purple bicycle chain. “This is Claire’s.”
“She should learn to keep track of her things,” Storm Siren said. “My Rainy…”
“Oh, put a cork in it, Evelyn,” Minerva said, and she disappeared with a pop, leaving Storm Siren to deal with the approaching squad cars.
It was the rudest thing she could have done under the circumstance, and not because she’d interrupted her in the middle of a sentence and then rushed off at superspeed. No, it was rude because it practically guaranteed that the next morning’s headline would trumpet the fact that Storm Siren had been found at the scene of a trashed Evco store… a situation that would require much “no comment”-ing from both of her personae.
Of course, another perceived volley in the supposed grudge war between billionaire plutocrat Evelyn Everett and superpowered vigilante Storm Siren might have been enough to beat out a portalien probe outbreak for the top spot, but there were some stories that the Nebula City press recognized as being more important.
However, Evelyn didn’t take much comfort from being spared any further embarrassment when the lead story instead proved to be, “Mad Genius Escapes From Dunwich; Portalien Involvement Suspected”.
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