Cassie muttered sothing that she didn’t bother to share and dropped her father’s sword.
As she did, the skull leveled out as the top half hit the floor, landing on a burning cubicle wall. Part of marveled that any part of the skull was working, but I hadn’t gotten a good enough look after she’d cut it.
She’d cut it diagonally from one side of the bottom upward, revealing Dr. Mind, but not slicing into him—much. She’d cut into the outside that the brain’s tendrils extended into, but not the main body of it. While she’d cut into the ceramic container at the center of the skull, destroying Dr. Mind’s primary life support environnt and many of the skull’s internal systems with it, Dr. Mind still lived.
Worse, so portion of the skull’s offensive systems worked because the mouth had begun to glow greenish-white, gathering energy to finish Cassie off.
That wasn’t an assumption either. Dr. Mind’s PA buzzed with static, but he half-shouted, half-gargled his way through saying, “Die!”
I, anwhile, had fired off a killbot and narrowcast my sonics into the open skull from above, hoping a new vulnerability had opened up.
Cassie wasn’t waiting for rescue. She’d jumped sideways, pulling her gun around and aiming it toward the brain in the middle. Dr. Mind didn’t fail to notice this, firing a beam from the mouth before the skull even fully turned toward her.
Likely damaged, the mouth’s beam couldn’t seem to point in a straight line anymore, spraying instead of generating a continuous beam, and starting fires and lting every cubicle within thirty feet.
As the remaining guards in that section tried to roll away despite Camille’s gravity well, Cassie locked in. Her gun fired, its beam as straight and precise as Dr. Mind’s no longer could be.
Before my killbot reached its target, her beam turned Dr. Mind’s brain into a greasy pile of ashes.
Dr. Mind’s beam stopped as the skull’s tal lted, the ceramic blackened and shattered, and the remains fell to the ground.
“Asshole,” Cassie muttered over the group channel as I recalled the killbot.
She shook her head and then stared, running over to the spot where she’d cut into Dr. Mind’s skull and pulling out a section of blade from the rubble. Slipping it into the sword’s scabbard, she grabbed the hilt and repeated the move, testing if it would stay in place.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.
It clicked in, and she asked , “Can you fix it?”
Replying through my implant, I said, “Not now, but I should be able to at ho. Worst case scenario, I can make a new one.”
“I’d like this one,” Cassie said, “but whatever. We can worry about that when we get ho.”
She turned around, giving the room a once-over. She wasn’t alone. I hadn’t been paying attention to anything other than Dr. Mind, either.
A tall, silver-haired man with a long scar on his cheek held his hands in the air, shouting, “We surrender,” over his own personal PA, a triangular protrusion on the breastplate of his black uniform—Rook’s design. It appeared to have been reverse-engineered to imitate one of Grandpa’s.
My implant labeled him as “Edward Alan Branch, Night Commander of the Nine’s Island Command Center.” It added, “rcenary. Expelled from the French Foreign Legion. Reads romance novels. Facebook account currently controlled by Russian botnet.”
Branch, whoever he was, was older. I supposed he might not be very savvy on social dia.
Via implant, Haley asked, “Can I use everyone’s PAs?”
“Sure.” I gave her control.
Her voice bood out across the room, “Everyone who wants to surrender should drop your weapons, all of them, and stand next to the walls.”
To our implant channel, she added, “Gravitystar, let them go.”
Camille let out a sigh and said, “I’ll be happy to.”
Everyone dropped their weapons and migrated to the walls on either side of the room without complaint. They didn’t complain when we stuck them to the walls with goo either, not even Night Commander Edward Branch.
He did look down at the streams of gray goo and frown, but that wasn’t much of a reaction. When he looked up, he asked, “How long does it last?”
“An hour or more,” I said, “but it depends on many different factors. It could be as many as five. I tweaked the formula for extra ti before we went in. I don’t know how much.”
Branch continued to frown, but said, “As long as we don’t starve or die in a fire, we’ll be fine then.”
Noting that the fires around Dr. Mind’s skull had gone out, I said, “Unless you’re already starving, I wouldn’t worry.”
Branch shook his head. Next to him, a smaller, overweight man looked down at the ground. Despite the ominous, black, “legion of evil”-style armor, he didn’t have the intimidating presence you’d expect. It wasn’t the weight either. It was the slouching.
My implant labeled him, “Brian Hart. Assistant Director of Teleportation Operations. Plays MMORPGs more than 20 hours a week. Attempting to beco an MMORPG influencer. Has 27 subscribers.”
Hal had said pressing them on their weak points might give us a tactical advantage, but pointing out his subscriber numbers just seed an—not to ntion unnecessary as it turned out. He started talking on his own.
Looking up at , he said, “I didn’t know what I was signing up for. I don’t want to go to jail. I’ll tell you anything. How about this? Look in the back of the teleportation room. You wanted to kill Dr. Mind, right? You’d better look back there.”
User Comments
0 comments from readers