Alien Diplomacy (61 page)

“How can you do something like this?” Amy asked. Good, she was embracing our team’s reliance on keeping the bad guys monologing. Leslie still had me up in the air but, thankfully, still wasn’t squeezing hard. Either she didn’t want to go against her father’s wishes, or she wanted me to see my friends die before she killed me, or both. I bet on both.

Marling nodded to Amy. “I respected your father. It’s too bad you were always a disappointment to him.”

“You and my father are both disappointments to humanity. I’m flattered to be someone neither one of you respects. I don’t understand why you made androids of your children, though.”

“Because I love them,” Marling said simply.

“Then why didn’t you make an android of your wife?” I asked.

He turned to me, eyes flashing. “How dare you?”

“Blah, blah, blah. You didn’t love your kids, not like you loved your wife. If you had, you wouldn’t have made these monstrosities to stand in for them.”

“We’re perfect,” Leslie said.

“Well, you were,” Bryce snickered. “Now? I think you need to go in for an upgrade. Make her prettier, would you?” he asked Marling.

“Bryce really is an amazing creation. No one would believe an android could be such a total tool.”

My girls all laughed at this. Bryce flushed. Yeah, Marling did really great work. What a waste.

Leslie’s eyes narrowed, but she was glaring at Bryce. They were looking at each other, not me. I probably wasn’t going to get a better chance. I’d pay the price later, but right now called for pulling out all the stops. I focused and forced myself to rev up to what I’d been at when things were going sideways during Operation Confusion.

Cartwright had shared how this group planned to destroy my husband and likely my child too. They wanted to destroy all of my friends and family, everyone I cared about. And they wanted to hurt Jeff and Jamie in ways that would ensure they died in agony, ripped apart by their own powers, because they loved me.

It took no time for me to focus on the one thing I knew would bring the adrenal rush faster than anything else: rage. I saw red and knew it was time to channel Wolverine’s patented Berserker Rage.

I grabbed Leslie’s wrist and focused all my strength as I bent and twisted. I pulled my neck free as her wrist snapped. It broke off in my hands.

She screamed while I landed on the floor. I threw the hand at her and ran. Bryce just missed me. I was at the speed I’d been when I’d been kicking butt and having the Poofs eating bad guys underground in Paris. Maybe I just did my best work under the earth and pissed off beyond belief.

Naomi and Abigail grabbed the others, and I grabbed them as their shield flickered out. I dragged them behind me as I slammed through walls, pulling them with me. I risked a look behind. The girls seemed attached and okay. But the supersoldiers were following us, weird weapons blazing, slashing, or whatever some of them actually did.

It was interesting. I had complete control when I was revved up to this level. The fire alarms were still blaring, and that meant no elevators would be working, or if they were, they were ferrying passengers from the higher floors. The garbage chute might work, but it was iffy. That left the stairs. I had to figure the Gower girls had used up all their reserves, meaning they’d all be moving at
human speeds, but my job was to stall so they’d have time to get away.

I dumped them in front of the stairwell door. “Get out of here and get some help! That’s an order.”

With that I turned around and launched myself at the supersoldiers heading for my friends.

I
HIT THE FIRST ONE,
grabbed an extremity of some kind, and used the momentum to swing myself onto the next in line. Did this a couple of times and ended up on the sorta-shoulders of one of them.

I grabbed its head portion and twisted. It was hard; I really had to put my back into it. But I felt it start to give.

“Don’t let it out!” Marling shouted. “They’re only controllable while they’re in the suits!”

Oh, really? Interesting. I didn’t stop pulling and twisting, however. It felt the way I imagined riding the mechanical bull would, only a lot more stressful, and with no drunks cheering me on.

“Stop!” Bryce screamed. “They’ll kill us if they’re out.”

“You and Leslie aren’t really alive,” I shared while I ducked low to avoid a shot from one of the other supersoldiers.

“They’re as alive as you are,” Marling said as I finally got the lid off one really hard-to-open can. Naturally the smell was horrendous. I didn’t stop to sniff the roses, therefore.

Instead I threw the helmet portion at Marling and hit him, knocking him to the ground, I assumed because I was working faster and throwing more strongly than he’d been prepared for.

The superbeing inside the metal shell was trying to get out. I didn’t have a lot of time and fewer options. But from what our latest set of genius loons had said, these things likely had Mephistopheles’ DNA in them. I opened the clutch and grabbed the hairspray. I didn’t bother with spraying, just ripped off the top and dumped the whole bottle in.

I jumped off as the thing started screaming in a way that was so far from human I could barely recognize it as real. But real it was.

It flailed around, slamming into two others. It was still able to use its weapons, and it did, against its brethren. They, in turn, fought back. I couldn’t tell if Marling was controlling them or not, then saw that I’d hit him in the head with the helmet, and he was knocked out. Nice to know he was still human, to use the term loosely.

I ran and grabbed the remote before Bryce or Leslie could reach it. It was like they were moving in slow motion, which meant I was revved to my highest level. I had the remote, which was great. But I still had no idea how to work it.

Considering how the supersoldiers had reacted when the other remote had been destroyed, I knew it had to be protected. Plus, it was the only thing that would control them. I didn’t want to lose it again, either. I considered my options and dropped it into my clutch, where I probably should have put it in the first place.

The Poofs weren’t in there anymore. I had no idea where they’d gone, but clearly handling metallic superbeings was beyond them, and they’d wisely headed for the hills or the nearest Poof Condos.

Standing still had given Bryce and Leslie time to reach me. They both slammed into me and tackled me to the ground. They reared back, presumably to start the android version of ground and pound, but they were ripped off of me before any punches landed.

Jeff was roaring, already at “lion takes over the veldt,” but I hadn’t heard him because the supersoldier fight was making so much noise I couldn’t hear anything else. I knew he was roaring, however, because of his expression, which was seriously pissed.

He had each of them by their necks and slammed their heads together repeatedly until I saw them both essentially short out. He was moving so fast he was blurry, meaning he was functioning at his super-duper level. His jacket was off and his shirt was open. I didn’t have time to try to figure out why or enjoy the sight of his awesome pecs and abs. Fugly fighting was so rarely fair.

I could tell that someone else was in here, beyond Marling, who was still out, and the supersoldiers, which were still blasting and slamming into each other. He was moving fast, faster than Jeff, but I could just tell it was Christopher.

Well, Superman and the Flash were here, and just in time. I looked around for Batman. Sure enough, I spotted Chuckie, coming in with the rest of the humans. I got up, ran to him, and shoved the remote into his hand. “It controls them. I have no idea how. They won’t hurt you if you’re holding it.” Then I ran back to Jeff.

I arrived in time to see metal pipe wrapping around three of the supersoldiers as if it were a really fast snake. The one whose head I’d ripped off was down, twitching. The two it had been fighting were down as well, but they weren’t out.

Jeff and I went to these and started ripping parts off. “How do we get rid of these things?” Jeff asked.

“I poured hairspray into the Headless Horse Thing. Which I think killed it. It at least hated it a lot. But Marling said they’re uncontrollable out of the suits, so I don’t know that we want to pull any other helmets off unless we have some of those snazzy self-contained nukes loaded with alcohol handy.”

“Coming right up,” Tim shouted from behind us.

Christopher joined us. “No more pipe,” he said. “But I have party favors.” He had two of the nukes.

“We just carry these things around all the time?”

“No,” Christopher snapped, Glare # 5 in place. “Doreen insisted we needed to call for some.”

I took them while he and Jeff ripped heads off. Helmet off, nukes in, helmets slammed back down. Then the three of us dashed off and stood in front of the others.

The explosions were interesting in that the metal didn’t dissolve or anything. But it was clear from the weird movements of the metal that whatever was inside had been blown to smithereens. Icky crud exiting through the cracks the supersoldiers had made in each other’s armor was also a clue.

“Creepy.” The remaining supersoldiers turned on us as the three Christopher had tied up broke free. We all ducked as pipe shrapnel flew all over. “Oh, good.” The supersoldiers went into formation and started for us.

“Dammit, that’s wrong,” Chuckie snarled under his breath as he ran in front of us. The supersoldiers stopped. They seemed confused. Chuckie fiddled with the remote, and all of a sudden they looked the way they had when Adriana and I had first found them: turned off. We all breathed a sigh of relief.

“Is there a way to stop these things other than that remote or us shoving self-contained nukes down their necks?” Jeff asked.

“No clue,” Chuckie said. “I’d assume their creator knows, though.”

I looked down. There was water on the floor. “The supersoldiers have rubberized soles. We can’t electrocute them.”

“But we can
be
electrocuted,” Jeff mentioned.

As he said this, I saw Marling stagger to his feet and grab some
wires the fighting had exposed. He was about to yank when shots rang out. The bullets knocked his hand away from the wires. “Freeze,” Reader said. “I didn’t shoot you dead for a reason. But that doesn’t mean I can’t or won’t.”

Marling looked down at the very crumpled remains of Bryce and Leslie. “You killed my children.” The water wasn’t to them yet, but if they were still able to function, Marling was the most amazing scientific genius in the history of the world. Jeff had literally smashed their heads flat.

“No. You killed them, and your wife, a long time ago, because you were doing the whole tampering with things man is not wont to and all that jazz. These aren’t really your children and never were. You wouldn’t have done all the things you did with them, to them, made them do what you have, if you believed they were human.”

“How can you say that?” he asked me. “I care for them. They’re mine.”

“Yeah? Why didn’t you clone your wife, then?”

“She…her…Madeline forbade it.”

“Right, the same Madeline who, along with Yates, suggested cloning the kiddies didn’t somehow also suggest cloning her brilliant sister? Pull the other one.”

“We didn’t have the right DNA for Cybele.”

“I’ll bet. So, using whatever excuses passed muster, you didn’t clone your wife, who I definitely believe you loved very much. Speaking of those you love very much, where’s your parrot, Bellie? The one you named after your wife?”

Marling stared at me. “Safe at home in her cage.”

“Exactly. She’s a living thing you love. So you have her safely out of it. You haven’t made a clone of the bird.”

“Water’s rising and spreading,” Jeff murmured. “And he feels like he’s just come out of the Washington Wife class.”

I knew what that meant. “How do we destroy these supersoldiers?”

Marling laughed, and it was the laugh of a crazy man with nothing left to lose. “You don’t.” He looked right at me. “Trust me. Compared to what else is out there, these are your friends.” Then he yanked on the wires as the water reached his feet.