2-60: Payoff
I made sure to wait until the moment when the explosion went off to duck. Meanwhile, the Spider was taken by surprise as she tumbled back.
Clearly not the kind of person who was used to being in the middle of it in a combat situation. Then again, I was the kind of person who was ideally flying around in orbit above a combat situation, and not directly in the middle of it. So it's not like I could fault her that much for reacting, especially when I already had advance notice that the fireworks were about to start.
"The antigrav missile worked wonderfully," I said, turning and giving Arvie a thumbs-up in the simulation.
"The bombers are in place and ready to fire off more munitions if needed," Arvie said, turning his attention to some of the displays in front of him. Which was an odd affectation for the computer. I assumed he didn't need to look at any of those screens. Maybe he was doing that for my benefit.
I looked up at them as well. There were multiple drones floating above the imperial detention facility. All of them showed various views of the place, and a lot of them were showing a massive hole that had been blown in the side of the building.
It was a massive block. Apparently, the imperials didn't get all fancy with how their detention centers looked. It was the kind of utilitarian stuff that looked like it could’ve come from the old Soviet playbook on ancient Earth. Brutalist in the extreme, without even windows for their prisoners.
Even the brutalist prison skyscrapers on Earth had windows for the prisoners. Not that brutalist prison skyscrapers were really a thing on Earth any longer.
"Okay, keep the bombers on standby," I said. "Are we ready with the invasion force?"
"We are," Arvie said.
"Hold them in reserve. I want to see if Tmors here is able to pull off his part of the bargain."
I turned and looked at the livisk. He looked back at me. He had a sickly look on his face. The kind of look that said he'd made a deal with the devil, and he was being asked to pay up. Only he wasn't quite so sure he wanted to do it.
Well, that was tough shit. If this all worked out then he was going to be a whole hell of a lot better off than he was prior to all of this happening. I still wasn't going to trust him any farther than I could throw him. Though it occurred to me that probably wasn't the best analogy these days. Not when I had enhanced strength that would allow me to throw his skinny, blue, sparkly ass pretty damn far. A lot farther than I could before.
He stared at me for another moment. The Spider was just barely picking herself up off the ground, shaking her head. Still dazed and disoriented from the explosion.
"What's going on?" she muttered, still blinking and shaking her head. I wondered if she had a concussion. I should be so lucky. I felt a little bad for hoping somebody had an injury like that, but all's fair in love and war, and the only love I had around here was Varis.
Varis, for her part, was also staring at Tmors rather intently, the kind of look that said he'd better get his ass in gear if he knew what was good for him. Finally, he sighed and turned to all the soldiers they'd brought along with them.
I use the term "soldier" loosely. It was mostly just people who went on raids with them when they were trying to hit the Imperials. Not the kind of people who had any sort of formal training. Though there might be a few who'd been in the Imperial military once upon a time and went AWOL or something. But even that meant they weren't exactly a shining example of the kind of person you wanted in your fighting force.
"Let's get a move on," Tmors said. "We need to get in there and get the prize."
I noted that he was deliberately vague about exactly what prize they were going for. He'd gone through the ranks and talked with most of them on the way up out of the Undercity. He did it under the pretense that he wanted to make sure everybody was combat-ready and had everything they needed. The Spider hadn't even so much as batted an eyelash. She'd been busy laughing and joking with some of her other lieutenants about how Tmors was wasting his time.
And I was more than happy for her to avoid paying attention to what Tmors was doing right under her nose.
"Wait, what are you doing?" the Spider said, finally taking notice of what Tmors was up to.
Only it was already too late. Her people let out a triumphant roar, and they ran forward and leapt off the front of the building. There was another building immediately next to us. They could basically pull a Batman and jump all nimbly bimbly from roof to roof until they reached the prison. Only they’d be trying to break something out of the prison rather than trying to keep something inside the prison like the Bat would under normal circumstances.
"Wait, what are you idiots doing?" the Spider called out, but her voice was lost in the din of all her people yelling and whooping and clearly getting ready for a little bit of combat. So none of them heard her to stop and think about what they were doing.
Not that I thought any of them would stop and think about what they were doing even if they wanted to. No, they looked like they were in the kind of mood where they’d even ignore their boss if they thought ignoring their boss meant they got to go on an adventure with a profit potential at the end.
Too bad for the Spider. And for the Spider's people if everything went too plan.
"You idiots," she growled at them. Though she put a hand up to her face like she was in some sort of pain. "You're not supposed to be following Tmors' orders. What are you doing?"
She tried to grab at least one person who was rushing past her. She managed to get hold of his arm and then he was gone, easily shouldering her away.
She stood there staring at the hand that had just been grasping the soldier's shoulder. Then she looked at me and her eyes narrowed. She brought her weapon up.
"You," she said.
The tip of her plasma pistol started to glow ominously. I held my hands up hoping I’d be able to forestall, or dodge, whatever attack she was about to hit me with, but she just kept going. The tip of her pistol got even more intense, and it started to make that ominous hum that sounds so wonderful when you're pointing your weapon at somebody else, but not so great when somebody else is pointing their weapon at you.
"Now, let's hold on for a moment and maybe talk about this," I said.
Meanwhile, in the simulation, I looked to Arvie and then I looked at the displays. There was a map that was a live feed from multiple micro drones hovering well over the city with advanced optics that allowed them to zoom in on anything and everything that we wanted it to. It could keep an eye on pretty much the entire city if we wanted it to.
Those kinds of drones were useless for actually keeping track of incoming, but when it was paired with a Combat Intelligence - which was something the livisk seemed reluctant to do for some reason - well, it became a formidable thing indeed.
So I could see people moving in all around us. Shadowy figures holding out plasma weapons of their own. Plasma rifles that didn't have the telltale glow because there was no point in going out and trying to be stealthy if you had a plasma rifle that announced your presence every time you brought it up.
A plasma rifle on a battlefield, or that you're trying to use for self-defense? Yeah, you wanted to send the message that somebody was about to make a big mistake by fucking with you, but not so much with the stealth stuff.
"Are you sure you don't want to reconsider?" I said.
"You said you were going to give me something valuable," she said.
"Correction. I said I was going to teach you a lesson."
"Well, I assumed that lesson was going to be a valuable one," she said.
I turned to her, and then I looked to Tmors. Finally, I turned to Varis and Rachel. Jeraj and Yana were standing in the background looking very interested, but otherwise not intervening.
"You know what they say about assuming.”
"What do they say about assuming?" she said.
I frowned as I thought about it. Varis chuckled, but I'd had to spend a few minutes explaining the nuance of Terran language before she understood the joke. I figured nothing would ruin this moment more than trying to explain a joke that relied on wordplay in an alien language to the Spider when time was of the essence.
"You know what? It's a bit of idiom that really doesn't translate in between our languages. But either way, here's your lesson."
She started to pull the trigger on her blaster. I could see the twitch as the battle link time distortion kicked in. I figured it was time to be done with this charade. So I pulled out my own plasma blade, activated it in an instant, and sliced the tip of her weapon clean off.
You couldn't use these things to interrupt a plasma blast the same as they did in Star Wars, more's the pity, but I could take out her weapon before she had a chance to use it on me. Which was about the same as blocking her plasma blasts. Assuming I was close enough to someone to cut the tip off before they could hit me with a blast.
She stared at the tip of her gun that had been glowing until so recently. She blinked a couple of times, and then she turned back to me. Her eyes narrowed as she let out a loud growl.
"I don't care if I don't have my gun. I'll kill you with my bare hands!”
"I think the only thing you're going to be doing with your bare hands in the immediate future is raising them," I said.
No one around me made a move. There was no need for them to make a move. Though, she did hesitate for a moment. She had to be well aware that she was looking at one and a half battle pairs right here, and one of those battle pairs was paired with the empress. Not that being paired to the empress made someone more powerful than anyone else, at least as far as me and Arvie could tell.
Battle pair strength seemed to be more a function of how much someone practiced with the partner in the battle pair. Even the empress didn’t seem to be super powered because she took on multiple battle pairs. No, the advantage there seemed to be strictly political.
Not that anyone had gotten in a one on one fight with the empress lately to test that assumption, but there’d been plenty of other empresses in the past who had to fight it out when their back was against the wall when the revolution came. None of them had suddenly started doing twirling flips over their desks with a plasma blade blazing when the revolution came for them.
But it wasn't the presence of a battle pair that stopped her, even though that should've been more than enough to give her pause. No, it was all of the laser sights that suddenly appeared on her chest, and one of them even moved up to her forehead.
"Okay," I said, rolling my eyes. "Who's being overly theatrical with the forehead laser?"
The Spider had gone cross-eyed looking up to where the laser was hitting in between her eyes. Then she looked up to a drone floating over my shoulder with a laser sight pointed at her.
"Apologies, William," Arvie said. "I think the more time I spend with you, the more I'm getting a taste for a flare of the dramatic in these things."
I looked up at the probe and then I started laughing, shaking my head at the ridiculousness of it all.