“So, er, are you going to release me from this netting?”
Max touched a wrist control and the netting around me loosened. I squirmed out of the mesh.
“So the girls are still alive?” I asked desperately.
“Well I presume so. That was the plan. Though Terri’s appearance is a bit of a surprise. I’d like to say nice surprise but I think it may wobble the model a bit.”
“Wobble the model?”
Conrad and Max looked at me with some disdain.
“It adds more uncertainty to our plan,” sighed Max.
“That was our aim,” I said.
“Yes… well. Let’s get you into the jet pack, shall we?”
“Max, don’t we need to discuss the plan?” puffed Conrad. “PK doesn’t have anything to stop these cyborgs.”
“How silly of me. I’ll tell you as we strap Peaky-boy in.”
“Huh?” I uttered as Max started lifting a jet pack onto my back.
Max explained as he strapped me in. “When I heard that Gruyère cheese was related to crime, I had this fridge light-bulb moment. I realised that it was the cheese!”
“You did. How?”
“That’s a long story but let me assure you that no matter how crazy it sounds, it’s the cheese!”
“But cheese!?”
“Hyper intelligent cheese.”
“And Gruyère cheese?”
“Yes, just Gruyère.”
“Terri’s favorite cheese?”
“There are no coincidences? Are there, Max?” growled Conrad.
Red-faced, Max continued. “I have been creating two weapons to defeat Gruyère ever since.”
“Why didn’t you just do your time travel trick and go back and sort it out?” I asked.
“T4P does not exist in the present time.”
“T4P?”
Max sighed. “You have a lot to learn about time travel. It really isn’t that simple. And the bureaucracy is simply appalling. We certainly don’t have time to discuss now, not if you want Karmen and Terri to live.” (No-one explained to me but T4P means “Time Travel To The Past”)
“Ok,” I replied meekly.
“The first weapon is an enlarged version of the netting system, I used on you, Aaron.” He handed over a thick tube as long as Max was tall.
“Hmm, I can vouch for the netting’s effectiveness.”
“You just need to aim at the robot’s head, dead centre, from any distance between fifty to hundred feet. The inbuilt processor works out the rest.”
I held the tube and nodded. Heavy but I could handle it.
“You probably need to take another two.”
He started strapping them onto my back.
“Max, this is all very well but it isn’t going to stop an army of these things. You said the cheese had an army of robots,” said Conrad resting in a chair.
Holding up a box, Max smiled, “ah that’s where weapon number two comes in. Aaron, unclip your right dart gun.”
I reluctantly removed my right gauntlet and handed it to Max.
Expertly he removed the existing ammunition and loaded new darts from the carton. “This,” he explained, “needs to hit the cheese. Not the fridge, the actual cheese. It will pump the cheese full of an organic computer virus that will strip the nervous system. It de-programs it. And because the cheese is hive-minded, the virus will replicate across all instances of the cheese everywhere.”
“So that will be it? We’ll stop the robot army?”
“That’s the plan. And afterwards I suggest we have a barnstorming fondue.”
“Let’s just do one step at a time,” suggested Conrad. “I’m getting information from the Police and the broadcast channels, that other Su-U heroes are arriving at the scene. We’ve been promised slot three, should the other two divisions prove ineffective, then we’ll be allowed on. The TV execs sounded pretty confident we’d get our slot.”
“Slot three?”
“There’s two other Su-U teams in front of us. And the military has been called in too, but they’ll take a while to mobilise.”
“They are right to throw the works at these things,” sighed Max. “Conrad, can you warn the heroes ahead of us to be careful. We don’t want anyone seriously injured. Even if they are our ratings rivals, let them know what they are up against.”
“A sensible precaution,” said Conrad.
“Aaron to the roof. I’ve already toothed you the navigation data. Conrad and I will follow in the Kittoffery Kart.”
I looked over anxiously at Conrad who was multitasking on the G-Phone. He nodded. So that was that. We had started with the aim of stopping a time-traveling super-villain and now we were working with him. Actually, it felt like, I was working for him.
“Can’t you take a couple of these pipes?” I said gesturing to the weapons.
“They don’t fit inside the kart,” sighed Max.
***
Thursday, February 14, 2123 0045 hours
I arrived at the traffic cordon mentally exhausted having jet packed only a few feet above the Hudson, overloaded with the Max’s weapons. I had to keep the throttle wide open and the fuel was running down fast.
From the holographic police barrier, I could hear noise one block away, above the small crowd of para-legals, paramedics and disaster tourists. There was a rhythmic thud, thud, thud, presumably created by the giant robots attacking the skyscraper. The whole area was illuminated by overhead emergency lighting craft making sure all the action was captured on camera but it also gave a spooky fairground feel to the situation as well.
I saw Nerdifier being carried away. Perhaps his invisibility suit had not worked, in any case, he had been caught by shrapnel and left unable to launch his heavy weaponry. The poor guy must have been in extreme pain, judging by the angle of his leg and quantity of blood pumping from his many wounds. It must have been almost a minute before the paramedics were able to drug him with morphine! A whole minute of pain! Unheard of! I checked my utility belt to make sure my pain-relief drugs were easily accessible.
My psychic alarm made a neutral burble as I was suddenly squeezed around the shoulders.
“My boy, my boy!” boomed a voice. It was Antonio flanked by two of his men.
“What the?” I spluttered, worried about the intrusion into my privacy (my secret identity) as well as my personal space.
“Take it easy, fun stuff. CK, tipped me off and I was in the neighborhood. This will-a make my numbers for the year. For the next five years. Just wanted to wish you well and tell you that I hope you don’t die,” beamed the debris-clearance gangster.
“I thought you were off to the Caribbean, anyway?” I said marvelling that I was able to recall such useless information on the eve of my potential deceasement.
“Blasting off in the morning. Jet-set hash tag. Yeah, just came down to give my team some encouragement. There’s a lot of mess to clear up already. And you guys haven’t even started. Thanks for the info, b-t-w. And as-a commission for the clear-up contract here, don’t worry about next month’s rent.”
“Thanks,” I said dejectedly. Fortunately the voice disguiser filtered out the sarcasm.
“Make that the next two months…. Uh-oh, Gillard is approaching. We share mutual hatred for de other. Must go hash-tag. Sign off,” Antonio slipped between his men and left as an officious looking corporate type strode towards me to the sound of friendly pings from my psychic alarm. This was Gillard. Green tinged, he was not a threat to me at any rate.
He was speaking into his G-phone and, apparently, to me. Not that it was registering too much in my frontal cortex. “There’s a network dark zone over the target area and so we’re reverting to line-of-sight communications, “ said a Forties-something Broadcast News Administrator for Channel TrueCrime-9+. He spoke as if he were coordinating the whole event. He probably was. “We’re going to give Spider-Guy another 5 minutes before we send in Sargent Canada and Glaredevil. Where’s your buddy?”
“They?
??ve er… gone underground,” I said nervously.
“Smart move. So just a single camera drone for you,” said Gillard, more to his G-Phone than to me.
At that point, a masked, supersuited guy, stout and shorter than me, appeared by my side. “Have no fear, Majestro is here.”
“OMJ,” sighed the broadcaster exec. “Who are you?”
“Majestro!” Max projected his Su-U authorisation hologram via his wrist controller. Max’s costume was angular, shiny metallic with a hint of gold.
But Gillard was not impressed. “This isn’t a good gig for a newbie.”
“I knew you would say that,” announced Max, proudly touching his head. “Precognition!”
“Confidence huh? Well that’s good,” he said unconvincingly. “Only a single drone and only five minutes. Don’t be late for the battle,” continued the exec, only caring for the broadcast schedule.
A dart hit the exec’s forehead. “Catch him,” Max said to me. Max had tranquilised the TV guy!
I didn’t get a good grip and Gillard slipped from my hands, hitting the ground quite hard. “Oops.”
“Let’s go,” said Max, striding past the illuminated no entry sign on the road way.
“I need my jet pack refueled.”
“You won’t need it. We must leave now,” said Max confidently walking through the holographic barrier while I trailed behind.
“What about the Gillard?”
“He’ll be fine.”
“I mean isn’t that a crime? And recorded, you know, with all the drones flying around.”
“I had my camera deflector switched-on. It’s just between him and us,” said Max confidently.
“And the crowd.”
“They’re on our side,” Max turned and waved at the small crowd around the cordon.
“Anyway, I thought you said you weren’t cut out to be a superhero and handed in your license?” “When there is more than one of you, it’s easy to change your mind,” smiled Max.
We trotted forward, in the direction of Quantact Building, pausing briefly to accept a little applause from the on-lookers.
***
Thursday, February 14, 2123 0055 hours
We turned the corner and discovered two massive robots, probably twice the size of the robot I fought with Karmen, each ripping the Quantact skyscraper apart girder by girder; throwing them aside in a style reminiscent of a table-side Japanese chef at a high end restaurant.
My heads ups displayed had superfluously tinged the robots red.
“One of the robots has lost a hand,” I shouted to Max. “At least they are not completely invincible.”
Max nodded. He was wide-eyed with fear but continued by my side. We closed in on the giants.
“Correction!” came Conrad’s voice over my headset. “It was reported that one of the robot missiles missed its target and blew up the other’s hand. That damage was self-inflicted. Our heavy weaponry has had as much impact as a kitten on a ball of wool.”
As if on cue, one of our prized heavy weight military drone aircraft screamed down the street just above remains of abandoned vehicles and released a missile at each robot. Neither broke their destructive rhythm, they merely reached down as the rocket was about to hit and snuffed out the attack like a candle flame.
“Ok, give me a net launcher,” said Max, restraining the panic in his voice.
“How come I’m carrying three and you’re not carrying anything?”
“I’ll take one now.”
I gave him a weapon.
“You take the one on the right. Aim above the head! Watch me first.”
Max bounded ahead towards the towering monster on the left and took aim.
“Wait,” said Conrad urgently over the headset. “Camera drones are not in place.”
The robot on the left, appreciating that it was being targeted stopped and turned towards Max.
Max lowered the weapon, smiled and waved at the robot. He pointed at his watch wrist, as if to apologise for the delay.
The robot now shifted its entire body towards us and aimed its right arm bristling with weapons at us.
“Move!” came Conrad’s useless advice. My psychic alarm started burbling wildly, apparently I had a “missile lock-on” warning.
I jumped towards a hole in the road, which was deeper than I thought, and tumbled down rubble into a lower road level, the subway level. An explosion roared around me and more debris fell into the subway. I scrabbled back up the broken roadway onto the road surface expecting to see multiple hunks of Max strewn around but, there he was. I was surprised to find him, in one piece, aiming his weapon at the robot.
“I’m going to have to take a shot,” Max said breathlessly.
“Yeah, do it. The drone is just coming online. Shame that robot’s attack wasn’t broadcast,” said Conrad.
“I think we need to to be worrying a bit less about the mainstream coverage,” I protested.
“Understood,” came Conrad’s smooth reply.
Max fired the weapon. It appeared to travel over the top of the robot’s head then suddenly like a star-burst firework, threads fired off towards the target spiralling in both directions to create a netting around it.
It seemed to work. The robot struggled, managed to get one arm free, but then the netting closed tight around the robots legs and it quickly lost balanced and fell into the stumpy remains of the Quantact building.
“Now, you!” urged Max.
I took aim at the other monster and fired; perfect trajectory. The missile released its netting in a star burst. However the robot reached up and grabbed the star-burst netting. The netting wrapped around the robots fist but then again, all it really needed for its current task was a fist.
My psychic alarm went off; be-doh, be-doh; Warning of incoming heavy object.
The fist was coming straight down towards me. I was paralysed by fear and indecision.
Crunch. I saw the fist bounce away.
Huh? I was not dead. Or crushed. Max had wrapped himself around me. He had saved my life.
“My invincibility shield…” he tried to explain.
I burbled an unintelligible reply.
“Oh Murphy! The energy reclaim hasn’t worked. I’ve only enough charge to repel one more of those. We need to try again with the net-weapon,” suggested Max.
“The last one. I think you should use it,” I suggested.
“Sure,” said Max and took the tube.
Max aimed the missile above the robot’s head. Another perfect shot. The missile released its netting in a star burst. Then the robot reached upwards and tried to grab the net again. Despite its fist being bound and unable to grasp, it was able to swat the netting away like a tennis ball. Confident it had dealt with the problem, the robot then returned its attention to us and swung a fist down towards us. “Be-doh, be-doh,” sung my alarm.
“Get behind me,” shouted Max.
I hunched behind him as he raised his arms and powered up his force field.
Crunch. Max and I somersaulted away from the huge robot fist as it was deflected to the ground.
Argh! Pain. My arm! My left arm was broken.
I staggered around, dazed.
“That’s it. The shield’s finished,” puffed Max.
“Oh frack...”
The robot moved towards us to finish us off.
My survival instincts kicked in. “Down here,” I pushed Max with my right arm, down the hole I had previously fallen into and rolled down after him clutching my damaged limb.
There was another giant crunch, as the robot pummelled the road above us, made all the louder by the metal-lined environment we were now sheltering in.
We could hear the robot clawing at the road surface trying to break through.
I scrabbled for my morphine injector and squirted the pain relief into my left shoulder.
“Do have any more of that?” asked Max.
I handed over my second and last injector.
Max
injected morphine into his hand.
“I hurt my thumb,” he explained wiggling it in front of me. I tried not to be angry at his low pain threshold.
“Do we have any other weapons?” I asked.
“No, that’s about it,” sighed Max.
“So what now?”
“Avoiding deceasement seems top priority.”
“What?”
“Staying alive!”
Then there was an even louder crash, long echoes, then silence.
“What’s happened?”
We paused a while longer to make sure everything was completely still before we returned to the surface.
Once we were back in line of sight of the camera drone, Conrad was in contact. “Are you ok?”
“We’re fine. What happened to the robot?”
“See for yourself!”
The first robot was trapped within in the netting and completely still. The second robot seemed to have collapsed face first into the roadway. Just as I struggled to comprehend what had happened, I saw three figures climb on top of the robot. Two were female with flowing capes.
“Terri,” I gasped with joy.
“Names!” uttered Conrad. I had broken communication protocol... again.
“Right! Oops.”
Camera drones closed in on the three figures from all directions.
“Ok, I’m off now,” I heard Max say.
I looked around but he had disappeared. Literally, since he had switched his invisibility cloak. I saw it flicker. “This cloak won’t last for long. See you later, Peaky. You did good.”
I ran toward the three figures, up the arm of the robot to meet them. There was Improbileon standing impressively and imperiously. Max Three, (“Max-3”) also dressed as Majestro, was waving at the camera drones. And there was Terri, looking fabulous in her caped costume and flowing hair, surveying the area checking for new threats. I ran up to her and gave her a right-armed hug.
“Ok, ok,” she said, trying to bring me down from my adrenaline high. “Mind those spikes,” she said, reminding me of the spikes extending from my mask.
I shook Max’s hand, and had a quick clasp with Karmen (taking care not to catch her winged helmet on my mask).
“What did you do? Virus darts?”
“That’s right. Virus darts. You didn’t think that you had the only lot, did you?” said Max-3.
Terri explained. “We escaped down a chute. Blasted our way from the basement to the subway. Then Improb blasted a hole in the strapped-up cyborg and Max splattered the gooey cheesy filling with his dart gun. It took effect almost straight away and a minute or so later knocked out the other one. The virus propagated quickly.”