Mace immediately dropped towards the floor as one of the MMD’s charged out of the darkness straight at her. Mace instinctively twisted her body round in mid-air and unleashed three bolts, one after the other, directly into its chest. It was only the sudden change in air pressure that had alerted her to the attack and, as a result of the unexpected fall, she’d landed badly on one knee.
She ignored the pain and ran for what she hoped was cover. She found it behind several black boxes by the simple act of running straight into them. She checked her crossbows. The new integral bump stock was working better than she’d expected. The multiple bolts had been dispatched almost instantaneously. She forced herself to put weight back on her badly bruised knee and ran forward again, towards the light.
She was out of time. She could no longer work her way through the darkness using stealth to take out her opponents; in this case several reanimating MMD’s; Mobile Mannequin Distractions that Annie had borrowed from Sam’s chamber and had set up in the team’s training room for her. Mace’s methodology of slow and careful had worked great at first but whatever Annie’d done to the MMD’s programming they were getting faster and more accurate the longer she was in the room. Now they were actively teaming up on her and forcing her to react without time to plan. She hated that. She preferred to evaluate the situation properly first, before having to act, but this scenario didn’t give her that option.
She heard the sound of at least three MMD’s manoeuvring into position behind her. She was starting to suspect that they were working with IR sensors or radar and not limited to normal vision like herself. In front of her was the only source of light in the whole blacked out chamber. An intensely bright spotlight highlighting the MMD’s ‘captive’ who was tied to a chair about thirty metres in front of her, apparently unguarded. She estimated that the way out was to her left, another twenty-or-so metres away and about two metres off the ground. A green laser sliced through the darkness to her left. It was now or never.
She charged across the room, leaping over the boxes that invisibly blocked her path. To end this she had to save the blue-furred Beebo doll that was acting as the hostage in this scenario and get out of the room with it ‘uninjured’. She unleashed another standard bolt which severed its bindings and unfortunately activated the doll; it spoke in a creepy, toddler like voice, “Beebo loves its mama. Mama wan’ta cuddle?” and started to stretch out its arms. Mace grimaced and reached out grabbing the doll by its outstretched arm when suddenly there was a loud explosion and the air was filled with cloud of white powder… Flour, the ruddy doll had been rigged with flour and set to explode as soon as someone touched it! She sneezed violently and felt the tingle of the harness which signalled that several of the MMDs had fired their lasertag weapons and she’d been hit, multiple times. Game over.
The lights came on and Mace realised that her hair, face and costume were now covered in a thick layer of suffocating white flour. Annie walked in smiling, holding a hand hoover. She handed it over then walked behind one of the black painted boxes and picked up another bound and gagged blue-furry Beebo doll. “This was the real hostage; the one you grabbed was a decoy intended to distract you.” She pointed at the remains of the exploded doll, at its hairy blue face which Mace could now see had a small goatee beard plastered on its chin. “First rule of sci-fi, evil clones or parallel universe twins are always identifiable by their goatees…”
Mace shook herself and a cloud of flour enveloped her, made her cough violently as the fine particles caught in her throat. “Hoover, don’t shake, that’ll just make things worse,” muttered Annie apologetically as she came over, took the handheld device out of her hands and started to hoover her. “Ah, how’s your search going? I don’t mean to pry but it’s obvious you’ve been trying to find out some information from Police files, ECHO and HeroNet, I don’t think with much success? I just wanted to say, if either I or Frankie can help you with any searches, you just need to ask ok?”
Mace nodded, as yet unwilling to trust her deepest secrets to her teammates. The habit of never trusting anyone too deeply entrenched and buried beneath too many layers of psychological scarring. Maybe someday soon?
As soon as she finished getting rid of all the flour on her she left, leaving Annie to program the dwarves to clean up. She headed for the hangar. She’d some ideas she wanted to check out with Adam on how to convert the Crate before discussing her proposals for remotely controlling the ship in flight and fitting a launch tube to make it easier to propel her grav-bike out of the craft in mid-flight.
ECHO – European Coordinated Heroes Organisation.
Superhero Adventures, UK Style 