A Glitch in Time

by Gary D. Snyder

Chapter 11:

Jimmy's immediate reaction to Shego's announcement to join with them against Drakken was one of suspicion. "Why?" he demanded.

"Hey, gift horse here," Shego returned. "Besides, you think I want to end up spending the rest of my existence – however long that would be – inside a temporal black hole?" She waved the idea off with a grimace. "Definitely not in the job description."

"She has a point," Kim put in. "I have to admit that she always saw things a lot more clearly than Drakken ever did."

Shego took the endorsement with grudging gratitude. "And I have to admit I'm glad someone noticed who had a handle on things. Right now, though, I have to get you two loose. I don't fancy tangling with Drakken alone."

That startled Jimmy. "You mean you can't take him? I kind of thought you had the upper hand when it came to battles."

"Drakken himself isn't really a problem," Shego replied, "and his henchmen are nothing to speak of. It's his syntha-drones that are the real obstacle."

"Syntha-drones?"

"Don't ask," Kim told Jimmy. The memory of her encounter with Erik was still an open wound, and the less she had to do with syntha-drones the happier she would be. "Just get us out of these things and let's get going."

Shego pointed her finger at shackle binding Jimmy's wrists, steadying it with her other hand. "Okay, just hold still and think nice, cool thoughts."

Kim looked worried. "Can't you just unlock us?"

Shego shook her head. "Sorry, Princess. I can't unlock these things. The locks need two keys and I only have one."

"Great," Jimmy groaned.

"Hey, don't blame me," Shego protested. "If a certain meddling cheerleader didn't keep getting out of these kinds of situations so easily Drakken would have been perfectly happy to use just one key."

"Well, who has the other key?" Kim asked. "Or do I really have to ask?"

"Well, he's blue, a little too into himself, and has a nasty disposition when people cross him. I really don't think he'd be willing to hand over his key." She positioned herself again to fire at Jimmy's shackles.

"You're probably right."

"You're darn right I'm -" Shego began, and then realized that neither Jimmy nor Kim had spoken. "He's right behind me, isn't he?"

Jimmy nodded wordlessly. Both he and Kim had been so absorbed in what Shego was doing that neither had noticed Drakken's silent approach. Drakken fixed Shego with a withering gaze as she turned to face him. "Et tu, Shego?" he said.

Shego, used to being tight spots, tried to bluff her way out. "Hey, Dr. D!" she called out with a laugh. "Fancy seeing you here. I just thought I might try to get a little more information out of these two since they don't have much else to do. You know...just hanging around here."

Drakken expression didn't soften. "Save it," he said, clipping the words off as sharply as with a cleaver. "Did you think I wouldn't have this cell bugged?"

"Oh, great." Shego's voice was a study in bitterness and sarcasm. "We capture Possible and her sidekick every other Tuesday and the one time I try to throw in with them to save the world they're locked in a cell with a listening device."

"Not bad for a person who's 'a little too into himself', wouldn't you say?" asked Drakken. "Didn't it occur to you that I might also think I could get some useful information listening in on what they had to say to each other?"

"Well, now that you mention it, no," was Shego's reply. She dropped into a defensive stance and her hands burst into green flame. "Okay, Doc, maybe you won't believe me when I say that I was doing this as much for you as for myself. But hand over the key and let these two do what they have to. Don't make me do something I really don't want to do."

Drakken merely smiled, looking for all the world like a cat confronting a cornered mouse. "Oh, ladies," he called sweetly. "Would you come here, please?"

In answer to his call two dark-haired women appeared on either side of Drakken. Except for their uniforms, which were a deep blue, they looked identical to Shego, even down to the frown she usually wore. Shego, after her initial shock, was furious. "I thought we had a deal!" she raged. "No clones!"

"But these aren't clones," Drakken assured her. "These are the latest improvement in my line of syntha-drones, using the latest in genetic imprinting technology."

Shego didn't relax her guard. "Genetic imprinting?"

Drakken glanced over at Jimmy, who sighed and said, "It's a technique of directly transferring the characteristics from the genetic pattern of one individual to another without having to go through the process of cloning."

"Very good!" Drakken beamed. "I couldn't have said it better myself."

"If you could have at all," Kim sniped.

"I'll ignore that," Drakken sniffed. "What I've done, Shego, is to extract all the marvelous capabilities in that unique irradiated DNA of yours and transfer it into my latest batch of syntha-goo. I call it…She-goo."

"She-goo?" echoed Jimmy and Kim together.

"She-goo?" Shego mouthed with distaste.

"Yes!" the evil scientist chortled in delight. "And with it these drones are absolutely obedient to my will, with the full capabilities of the original subject." He leered at Shego. "Namely, you."

"We'll see about that!" Shego snarled. She leaped forward as streams of emerald energy poured from her hands towards one of the syntha-drones at Drakken's side. The replica, however, simply flipped out of the way. Simultaneously, the other drone loosed a similar burst of energy towards Shego. Shego succeeded in dodging the blast, only to be caught by second barrage from the first replica she had attacked and sent crashing to the floor. She rolled aside in time to prevent being hit by another bolt, but before she could launch a counter-attack one of the syntha-drones was on her, seizing her arms. A second later the other replicant was also there, effectively neutralizing her. Drakken sauntered up to Shego with a wicked smile.

"It really is true, you know," he gloated. "If one is good, two are even better."

Shego struggled uselessly against the combined might of the syntha-drones. "Drakken," she stuttered in rage, "you can't…you don't know what you're doing! You're going to get us all killed!"

"Or worse," Jimmy added, without much hope of influencing Drakken.

"For someone who doesn't know what he's doing," Drakken answered with a shake his head, "it appears that I'm holding all the cards. And since it seems that you have some new friends, it's only fitting that you share their cell with them. Lock her up!" he ordered the syntha-drones.

The was done in short order, leaving Shego chained to the wall between Jimmy and Kim. After relieving Shego of her key Drakken stepped back and regarded Shego with a look of sorrow. "It's really too bad, Shego," he said. "I thought we were like family. To be betrayed like this is worse than anything Possible or her friend could have done to me."

"I did it to save us! To save you!" Shego shouted back. "Can't you get that into your head?"

Drakken didn't appear to hear Shego's words. "Maybe it really wasn't deliberate betrayal so much as a misunderstanding," Drakken mused aloud. "Perhaps just confusion. I guess my brain-tapping device can get to the bottom of it, once I -"

He was interrupted by the almost deafening blare of an alarm klaxon that startled them all, save perhaps the syntha-drones. Seconds later one of Drakken's henchman appeared. "Sir!" he announced. "Our systems have detected a small aircraft approaching this location. It's coming in fast and will be here in about three minutes."

"How fast?" Drakken demanded.

"Difficult to gauge, sir. Best guess is somewhere between Mach 3 and Mach 4."

"A missile?"

"Impossible, sir," the henchman insisted. "Propulsion signature is unknown and its flight profile doesn't match any missile on file."

Drakken pounded a gloved fist into his palm. "That's not possible," he muttered. "Nothing can fly that fast. Unless…" He shot a quick look at Jimmy, but seemed to discount the idea that had come to him.

It has to be the Strato, Jimmy thought. But who would be flying it?

"Shall we shoot it down, Doctor?"

Drakken considered the henchman's suggestion and slowly shook his head. "No," he said. "I want to see what this thing is. If it really is coming here, allow it to land unchallenged." He looked at the syntha-drones silently awaiting his next orders and allowed himself a smile. "I have a little surprise I'd like to try out."

As the Strato neared the location that Cyber-Wade assured Ron was the source of the Kim-municator's signal, Cindy throttled back to subsonic speeds, feeling as well as hearing the sonic boom as they dropped back below Mach 1. "We're almost there," she announced needlessly.

Ron nodded. "I know. I wonder what we'll find."

"That's why we're here." She again glanced over Ron's suit. "Are you sure you know how to use that thing?"

"I don't know that I have to. I kind of get the impression that it makes its own decisions and take me along for the ride." He looked curiously at Cindy. "Why do you ask?"

"Something tells me that we're going to need it," Cindy replied. "I mean, if Kim couldn't handle whatever it was that she found here…"

"Hey, hey, hey!" Ron objected strenuously. "We don't know that anything here is the reason why Kim hasn't called Wade. She may have just dropped the Kim-municator, or it got damaged so she couldn't call, or something simple like that. Let's not go borrowing trouble here."

"Uh-huh, uh-huh," agreed Rufus.

"Even so," Cindy said, "there's something up, what with Wade going missing, Kim coming to see Jimmy, both of them disappearing without a word, and that weird flashback we both had." She sighed. "Even if there is nothing dangerous here, there's something big going on. And I doubt Wade would have given you that suit if he didn't think that only something major might be up."

Ron said nothing, but Cindy had apparently been thinking out loud and didn't seem to notice. The truth of the matter was that Ron also felt that something serious was going on, but he refused to accept the possibility that anything bad could have happened to Kim. Part of him steadfastly believed that she could handle anything, while the other part didn't want to face the implications that she may have come to harm and that the same peril awaited them. If there were danger, he fiercely told himself, he would face it when he came to it. For now, he would continue to believe that Kim was all right and she would greet him with the same sunny greeting she had always had for him.

He was so wrapped up in his thoughts that Cindy's nudge startled him. Looking about he saw that they had landed on a smooth ledge formed by a large outcropping on the side of a high mountain. As they exited Jimmy's rocket both Ron and Cindy saw a dark opening, half again as tall as a main and five times as wide, hidden among the fold of rock. The looked at each other, shrugged, and entered. Considering the situation there was little else to do.

The opening led to a fairly large chamber, and it was immediately clear to them that they must be on the right track. The chamber was clearly man-made, for while the walls were rough and folded the floor was smooth and level and electric lights hung from the ceiling high overhead, reflected in the polished floor below. On the far side of the cavern was another opening, apparently leading to wherever the Kim-municator must be.

"Can you read me?" Ron whispered. The large room instinctively made him lower his voice.

"Loud and clear," Cyber Wade's voice replied. "The signal is about sixty meters –"

"English, please?" Ron hissed softly.

"Sorry. About two hundred feet ahead of you and five hundred feet below."

Ron looked at Cindy. "It looks like we go forward and down," he said, soto voce. "There must be a stairway just through that other doorway."

Cindy frowned. "So this is the only way in?" she whispered back.

"Apparently."

"So why aren't there any guards?" She looked around, not liking the situation, every instinct in her screaming danger. "This is a big room. Why is it empty?"

"I don't know," Ron admitted. "But it's not like it's on a main street with people passing by all the time. Maybe they planned to have guards but found that they didn't need them."

Cindy thought about it and rejected the explanation. "No. They know we were coming. It's a trap."

Ron looked confused. "How could they know we were coming? We didn't even know we were coming."

"I don't know," Cindy answered. "But it's a trap. I feel it. I can almost smell it. The only question is who is -"

A bolt like liquid jade sizzled past both of them, sending Cindy sprawling on the floor and causing Ron to flip aside, rebounding off one of the rock walls and landing lightly some distance away. "I'll give you two guesses who," he muttered grimly. Without thinking about it he dropped into a defensive martial arts stance, prepared to face his unseen attacker. As he waited a lean, full-maned figure emerged from behind one of rock folds in the wall, her hands wrapped in a sinister emerald glow.

"It looks like I won't need that second guess," Cindy growled, picking herself off the floor. "It's Shego!" As she regained her feet another figure, identical to the first, emerged from another cranny on the other side of the room, causing her to gape in disbelief. When she found her voice again, she gulped, "Or then again…maybe I will."

End of Chapter 11