Raine VS The End of the World (38 page)

“It’s not about choosing one side or the other. A scientist is supposed to seek the truth.”

“Only we’re not scientists. Carl and Elizabeth were scientists. We’re just dolls for Lily to play with,” Lacie said, surprising Lucille, who glared at the others and made for the exit.

“What is it you two are trying to get me into here? I refuse to be a part of this conversation. And you, Lorrie, need to seriously get your act together.”

“You come back here right now.”

Lucy paused, glaring at her sister.

“Give me one good reason.”

Lorelei drew a knife from her utility belt.

“Because I’ll kill you if you don’t at least listen to what I have to say.”

Lorelei looked at the door and pressed her temple. She remotely locked all three latches from the outside.

“Rutger, alert Lily!” Lucy screamed.

“Negative,” the AI replied. “Alert system down.”

“How did you do that?” replied Lucy, aghast, but Lorelei simply looked amused. “And what if I don’t like what I hear?” she continued. “What’s to stop you from killing me then?”

“Hear me out. You know as well as I do that this ‘mission’ will never succeed. You’ve done the numbers in your head. The chances of success are monumentally slim. Every day of our lives, we walk the razor’s edge, toying with the lives of billions. And for what? Who says that the human race even needs saving? We’ve seen what they’re capable of, the terror, the evil, the deception. Every time we hit that reset button, we’re dooming the entire universe, again. For whose sake? For theirs, or for Lily’s? How much longer do you want to carry that blood on your hands? All you seem to care about is whether Lily’s exercise in vanity is going to be a success. What if she’s wrong? I mean, the human race is supposed to die, right? So just let them die. But she won’t listen to reason. Nothing is going to stop her. Someone has to teach her a lesson. Someone needs to teach her that she isn’t all powerful, that she has no right to play dice with the universe.”

“So you think that someone is you?” Lucy asked. “Fat chance.”

“I think that someone is us. I need you two to make this work.”

The next ten seconds were so silent each girl could hear the others’ heartbeats.

Lucy’s stoic glower remained plastered on her face, but she hadn’t moved since Lorelei started her little speech.

“Lorrie, please tell me you’re joking,” Lucy said, looking to Lacie for help. But her sister merely leaned back, watching calmly.

“The universe is a joke. You can weep or laugh with it; it’s your choice,” Lorelei said.

Lucy walked over to the door and tried the handle. It wouldn’t budge.

“Open this door.”

“Nope.”

She reached for the manual controls. Lorelei pointed a pistol at her.

“Ugh! So much for giving me a choice…” Lucille mumbled under her own breath.

“Rutger.”

“Yes, Miss Lorelei,” Rutger’s voice calmly enunciated.

“You’re recording this conversation, aren’t you?”

“I am.”

“And nothing I say or do can make you stop recording it, correct?”

“You are correct.”

Lorelei walked over to the microphone situated in the center of the ceiling. She removed the protective covering and began to tinker with it.

“What are you doing?” yelled Lucy.

“I’m not going to let any more people die in her name,” Lorelei said. “You had a chance to leave.”

“Hardly!” Lucille looked to Lacie, who simply continued drinking her cocoa as if nothing out of the ordinary were taking place.

“Miss Lorelei, please stop this instant,” Rutger said. “Engaging complete lockdown--”

Lorelei was quick on the uptake. She cleared her throat, changing her voice.

“Rutger, user login ElizabethH. Password mercurial3567.”

Lacie and Lucille held their breaths, visibly shocked at their sister’s actions.

“Login… authorized,” Rutger said, though his voice seemed pained.

“Rutger, belay that alarm. Override lockdown. You are not to inform Lily of anything that has just taken place.”

“U-u-understood.”

Lorelei finished dismantling the microphone. Raine watched in dreadful silence as the girl in red gathered the other two and huddled them up together into a triangle, hiding their faces from the cameras as they engaged in a clandestine discussion.

“What’s going on?” Raine asked. “Are they planning to hurt Lily?”

“It’s much worse than that,” replied Tony.

The locale changed to the
Belladonna
’s bridge. Lorelei walked over to the central console and inputted a few commands. She then connected her handheld communicator to the main system.

Tony cleared his throat so as not to alarm Raine, who was watching intently with all her being.

“In her hands is Lillian’s necklace, the
Belladonna’s
key. Here, I believe she’s inputting the coordinates for SpaceTime Warp Initiation. January 5
th
, 2180. Two hundred years into the future, just thirty-two before the solar flare is scheduled to hit. But see, she hasn’t yet activated the sequencer. Meanwhile, Lucille was busy shutting down Rutger.”

A camera showed Lucy crawling beneath the ship’s central console, a maze of wires and circuitry on the lower deck.

“Where’s Lily?” Raine asked, worried.

“She’s been drugged,” he explained. “All part of Lorelei’s elaborate scheme. It’s the only way they could acquire the master key.”

Lacie hunched over a console in a Hazmat suit within the depths of the Temporal Drive’s engine chamber. The footage showed her using robotic arms to detach two-dozen fuel cell containers from a sub-zero environment.

“Those fuel cells store the radioactive energies that power the Belladonna,” Tony clarified. “She removed all but one of them, per Lorelei’s orders. That last cell was near-drained; it had barely enough power to send Lily two hundred years into the future. Next, she’ll cut off the machine’s power converter, so that the
Belladonna
won’t be able to transmute any additional power towards Warp Initiation.”

She gutted a box of wires that led up to the ceiling. The robotic arms removed a rather complex-looking piece of equipment from within the heart of the engine. It and the fuel cell containers were loaded into a lead lined, electrically chilled icebox, which Lacie wheeled down the long hall towards the docking bay and placed into one of the shuttles.

Next, the scene shifted to Lily’s quarters. Covered in blankets, curled up like a grade-schooler, Lily was definitely a good few years younger than her clones.

Lorelei carefully lifted Lily’s head off the pillow and slipped the key back around her neck.

“Good morning, sunshine,” she chirped, smiling over Lily as she shook her from a deep sleep.

“Hmm?” Lily called out after a yawn. “Where’s the fire?”

“We’re good to go,” Lorelei said. “Might as well get this thing over with, eh?”

Lily sat up in bed, seemingly groggy but pleasantly surprised at Lorelei’s sudden change of heart.

“Is everything all right, Lorrie? You seem almost excited.”

“Maybe I’ve realized something,” she said. “There are some things even us Time Keepers can’t change. We’re meeting at the dock in five.”

Lorelei tossed Lily her green space suit and walked out of the room. Now definitely confused, Lily undressed and slipped the suit on.

The video cut to a wide-angled view of the bridge as Lorelei and Lily strolled by the central control console.

A chime resounded as they passed the message tube, hailing a newly received letter. Lily turned in time to see a red envelope whoosh down the tube and onto the silver platter.

“A red envelope, at a time like this?” Lily raised an eyebrow. “How odd.”

“Shall I get it, Miss Lily?” Lorelei offered, walking briskly towards the console.

“That won’t be necessary,” the younger girl replied sharply.

Lorelei bit her lip in nervous anticipation as Lily approached the tube. She quickly toggled a concealed button on her wristwatch, and for a second, a console out of Lily’s field of vision flashed a countdown timer: eight minutes, forty-four seconds to SpaceTime Warp Initiation.

Meanwhile, Lily cautiously unfolded the message from the future.

Tony hit freeze-frame and zoomed in on it.

Lily of seven minutes ago,

Lorelei is about to betray you. This is serious. Grab your electric whip and disarm her over your left shoulder in approximately twelve seconds, then Lacie, who will come from the docking bay. They aim to send you into the future, alone and without adequate fuel. Warp Initiation begins in eight minutes. Do not let them get away! Go!

Love,

Lily

The video resumed once Raine gave the signal.

Lily was in shock, the message trembling from her hands. It was unthinkable that her own clones could betray her.

She’d already lost five seconds.

"Show me what it says, sister," Lorelei asked in a chilly voice.

Raine watched closely as Lorelei pulled out an electric handgun and switched it on soundlessly. She aimed the now-pulsing weapon at the back of Lily’s head.

Without prior warning, Lily let out a primal scream. She spun around in a pirouette whilst uncoiling a thin electrified whip from her belt, the energy from triggering its kinetically charged hydrogen battery hissing like a coiled cobra.

The Captain dodged what looked like two lightning bolts, the second missing her neck by inches, and quickly shot her whip across the room, where it snapped onto Lorelei's ankle and pulled her to the floor. The cyborg tried frantically to escape. To stop her, Lily loosed a couple of short but high-powered jolts.

This was real violence. It had weight, and pain, and blood. Raine wanted to avert her eyes from the scene. Tony held her hand.

“It’s not fatal. She’s hoping to temporarily immobilize Lorelei by short-circuiting the cybernetic implants in her brain – twenty milli-Amps, not a small amount of electricity.”

Lorelei fell to the ground, her energy spent.

Lily lowered the voltage on the whip and tossed the message at her clone, tears running down her face.

“You want to know what it says, Lorrie? It says that you will have betrayed me!”

Just then, a shuriken came headed Lily's way – it just glanced her belly. She looked up to see Lacie in the doorway, tossing more at her.

Lily drew an electromagnetic knife with her left hand and deflected two projectiles with its polar fields, but a third one caught her right forearm, causing her to release the whip. Another shuriken landed in her calf.

The girl screamed in pain as she fell to the floor.

“Rutger, do something! Immobilize them! Suspend Lorrie’s circuits!”

Nothing.

“Y-y-you’ll find R-R-Rutger isn’t going to be m-m-m-much help,” Lorelei said with a wicked snort.

“Why? Why are you doing this?”

“You’re not even g-going to ask how I managed such a feat?” Lorelei asked as she carefully regained her footing. She looked somewhat disappointed.

“Quit stalling. I can name three ways off the top of my head. But I trusted you, and you deceived me. You’ve made the decision to doom our quest. We were so close. Tell me why. What could possibly mean more to you than fulfilling your destiny?”

Lorelei laughed. “Ha! My destiny? You chose this destiny for us. I’ve given up on trying to make you see things the right way. All your life you’ve been blinded by your own power.”

“I’ve only ever used time travel within the bounds of the Oath!”

“So you’ll play dice with this and any other universes, snuffing out endless lives, just so you can sow the fruits of a half-baked dream conjured up by two dead scientists.”

“Those scientists are my parents,” Lily wailed. “Without them, none of us would be here. Time travel wouldn’t be possible.”

“I don’t care! Someone else would have come up with the technology, and they might not have been stupid enough to get killed.”

At this, Lily jumped up from the floor and ran towards Lorelei in a violent fury.

Lorelei held up her hand to stop Lacie from throwing any more shuriken. She readied her fighting stance and blocked Lily’s rage-infused punches.

The younger girl delivered a roundhouse kick that pushed Lorelei off her feet. The clone staggered back. She put up her dukes. Lily followed suit. Lorelei responded by pulling a feint, then slide-tackling Lily and shoving her into the central console. While she was pinned, Lorelei continued to beat the Captain, throwing a flurry of punches into her gut. Lily struggled to break free; she didn’t have the physical reach or power that Lorelei had. It was painful to watch.

SBB paused the video in order to explain that while both girls had extensive virtual martial arts training, Lorelei’s cybernetic brain implants and network of nano-bots greatly increased her reaction time, regulated her hormone production, and granted absolute muscle control, making her super-strong, resilient to pain, and able to recover quickly, with the only downsides being a lack of empathy and a need for periodic maintenance.