“No extra beans,” Kayla said. “Got it.”
She looked down at the gun. It had two grips. The trigger and guard were on the back one. the front grip had a line of buttons on the side. Above them, it said, “Extra,” followed by “Beans,” “Cheese,” “Chunky Salsa,” “Green Sauce,” “Red Sauce,” and “Shell.”
Thinking back to English composition class from last semester, she wondered what Chekov would do if he saw a burrito gun hanging on the wall in Act 1 of a play.
Probably kill himself, she imagined.
“Where?” Haley asked. She wasn’t whispering.
“Above the forest. Right in the middle. It’s kind of close to the forest entrance to HQ.”
Haley’s eyes dipped toward the instrument panel. “The AI sees it, and it thinks it’s going to move…”
On the screen, the League jet exited the water, covered in panes of darkness, aiming toward the forest. The white beam, painfully bright even on the screen, aimed off to the side of where HQ’s scanner had identified it as an anomaly.
Above the forest, a silvery shape flickered, resolving into the aliens rectangular landing craft with a long burn down the craft’s side, and a blackened hole three quarters from the back. Continue reading The Battle of Grand Lake: Part 9
Then the man appeared. Wearing a black helmet with a transparent faceplate, the alien commander had thick features, somewhere between handsome and Neanderthal. Kayla wouldn’t have looked twice at him on the street.
Then he opened his mouth. His teeth were like a wolf’s—all points, ready to rip and tear.
She thought about how much it would suck to be his dentist, choking down a giggle while reprimanding herself in her head. What was she, ten?
The newscaster’s voice said, “The alien ship hovering over New York City broadcast this message moments ago.”
In a scratchy voice with an unidentifiable accent, the commander said, “You will give us the alien devices. They are not yours, and will only cause you trouble. Give them to us, and we will tell no one. Keep them from us, and we will burn your cities to the ground.”
His nostrils flared and he sniffed in a movement that reminded Kayla of Travis and Haley.
Gerald snorted. “Bet we could get in.”
Kayla felt her jaw drop. “I don’t think that would be—“
“I know. I know!” Gerald shook his head. “Even if they helped it wouldn’t be worth it. I saw what they did to people in the end. We’re all better off dead than that. I was speaking hypothetically. I saw the fight with the robots on the news. Nick’s been working with his grandfather’s mono-molecular blade tech. Chances are he’s got a prototype lying around.”
Marcus smiled, and leaned forward at the table. “He made a jackknife. I came down here once when he showed me. That wasn’t the best part though. The best part was when he forgot it was on and it cut through the table. He grabbed it before it went through the floor.”
Haley shook her head. “At least he didn’t cut his fingers off.”
“The ship?” Kayla glanced across the room toward the big, metal doors to the hangar.
“Might be,” Haley said, and sighed. “There’s a lot of stuff in the base, and I don’t know what a quarter of it is. The Rocket would know. Oh… Could you ask the jet to check out the ship?”
Kayla said, “Ok,” and began to move her mouse pointer toward the jet’s icon.
She only made it halfway when the jet’s square started blinking, and a message appeared.
Kayla sat in a chair in front of a computer screen inside one of the most famous secret bases in the world, and tried to stay awake.
It had sounded more fun when Cassie pitched it to her last summer. Cassie had been grinning the whole time. “We need someone back in the base to do research or call for help or whatever. You need money for college. This way you’ll be able to help, but you won’t have to be in danger, and we’ll be able to hang out all the time like we did before.”
“Before” as in before Cassie got her father’s superpowers, turned cape, and revived the Heroes League.
It was also “before” (though Cassie didn’t know it then) as in before the Nine targeted Cassie, forcing her to relocate to Washington D.C.
I’d noticed clouds forming since the fight started, and as I was about to press Theo on exactly how bad he felt, lightning erupted in front of the building.
Travis had told the glass cannons (mobile artillery, if you wanted to be formal) to help us, and now they were. I’d have taken help earlier, but Daniel was in the group, and he’d probably been responsible for the timing. That meant that this was probably the best possible moment, whatever I might think.
Thanks to my observation bots, I had three different perspectives available. All of them showed essentially the same scene.
As our group dived behind the old factory to get out of the machine race soldiers’ line of fire, the remaining robots split into two groups, some of them heading for the building that we’d started at, and the rest spreading out as they aimed for our building. No matter what direction we turned toward we’d be in some robot’s sights.
At least that’s the way it would have gone. Continue reading Stardock: Part 15
“Wow,” I said, “you’re early.”
Mindstryke shook his head. “Not really. I told you the latest we’d be here was ten, and some of us happened to finish up earlier than expected.”
He was right. Now that he’d mentioned it, I remembered him saying that. I also remembered a couple other things he’d said.
“We’re still waiting on part of the current League, and one member of the board.”
I was about to ask him who that was when the words, “Entered: Accelerando, C. Retinal scan confirmed,” appeared on the bottom of my screen.
Shortly after that one of the tunnel doors swung open, and Jaclyn walked through with her grandfather. She wore her purple costume—not really more than a jumpsuit, but she didn’t need it for protection. The hard part was creating a fabric that could handle hitting the speed of sound. Continue reading Spin: Part 6
The flunky started hitting himself, and screaming, his voice reminding me again that this was Davis, the guy who’d made the offer to Courtney.
I wondered for a moment how much damage I wanted to do to him. I had questions for him, after all, but that didn’t matter as much as I’d have thought.
Rook’s suits were pretty well constructed.
The bots wedged themselves into cracks, but they did a lot more damage to the powered armor than the person inside. Plus, after the first wave, I brought in a wave of EMP bots.
The first wave withdrew as the second settled on him. He stopped hitting himself for a moment, and adjusted his footing, probably in preparation for attacking me—or possibly escaping.
Then the EMP bots exploded. Continue reading A Kind of Small Crow: Part 10
I wasn’t worried about the communicators’ encryption. I’d only put them together last spring. It wasn’t as if they were old League technology that everyone had analyzed thirty years ago.
Maybe I should have been worried more. The communicators were based on the roachbots, and Grandpa had designed the first versions of the roachbots in the 1950’s as mobile bugging devices.
I’d updated them substantially over the past year though. Grandpa’s design survived only in the most general terms.
All the details of the current systems were mine.
Of course, the communicators still connected to the League’s old alert system. That might be a vulnerability.