Two person Job; Gamora's day: part two. Muzak.

The problem with turning yourself into a supervillain, aside from the sudden need to spend over one million units on a fish tank for your lair and gods know how much on antihistamines if you're allergic to fluffy white cats, is that if the hero you've been trying to kill grabs a hovering golf buggy and just does a runner rather than staying to fight, is that you're left feeling really rather foolish and with about an hour to kill before you can put your evil plan in motion.

Women don't make oversights like this, which is why the vast majority of super-villains are men. This is also why having a sensible level-headed woman is a must in any evil scheme and, more specifically, why Baz Sandhurst was eating a healthy soylent wrap and calling the childminder to check on his son rather than standing around and moping that Drax had got away, as Isha and her researcher prepped the final stage of the plan. He was eating the wrap and calling he sitter still wearing his biomechanical power-armour because once you've gone the full hog and built the damn thing you want to get some use out of it, like a rental tux, but it was still far more sensible and mundane than this point in proceedings would have been without a woman's touch, Isha thought.

"So both Drax, the Kree and the woman got away?" he asked, trying to navigate that awkward third-act of wrap consumption when you've eaten enough to seriously undermine its structural integrity but not yet enough to finish the damn thing, and the one thing standing between you and culinary indignity and increased laundry bills is careful use of thumbs and blind luck.

"No: both indicates only two individuals. All three are currently un-accounted for. The Kree and Drax made it into the main city, outside the limited rage of our test transmitter, and without the main transmitter online we couldn't operate the drones at that distance. Use a napkin. The woman Gamora may yet be in the building, the air-vent lead to several external hard-points, but none of them seemed to be forced."

"Most likely she doubled back and made it out of the broken window while we were sending drones up the vents." Said Baz, utilizing a handy hovering drone as an improvised plate to re-wrap wrap and try to stop the last of his lettuce making a break for freedom. "That would be the logical choice for her to make. I doubt she has remained in the building. If so either the drone or Marcus or Carlos would have found her by now." He said.

In the gap between the ceiling panels of the staff canteen and the concrete roof of the building, directly above his head, Gamora took the marker pen and very carefully wrote the names Marcus and Carlos on her other arm. From computer records and Baz and Isha's conversation she'd worked out that when the security staff had been shed in favour of the drones being developed, at least five had been kept on. One she'd found dead, shot thought the head with his own weapon: she couldn't decide if the drone camped to his skull had told him to, or if he'd shot himself to try and stop it taking over his mind, but either way he was still dead. She'd suspected to co-opt the labs security system, which she'd found had intentional safeguards designed to stop the drones being used by Baz against the rest of the staff, would have taken at least one inside man on the security team. Now she knew there were at least two, as well as twelve researchers and at least twenty active drones.

Four of which were orbiting their creators at any one time like excitable puppies, making a sudden attack inadvisable until she worked out how to disable the things. Below, Isha tisked at the idea. Or possibly the rapidly disintegrating wrap, and staked over.

"Doubtful: her psychological profile certainly suggests she would stay and attempt to finish her mission, whatever that might be. She is a daughter of Thanos, I doubt she would be readily perturbed. Do you have some sort of ideological objection to eating that neatly? Use a napkin!"

Baz looked down at the bright yellow arterial spray across his chest from when he had decapitated Drid with a drone.

"I'm afraid we may be past that my dear. What is our estimated time of completion on the main transmitter? I would rather we were ready for a full field test before the police arrive and shoot us repeatedly."

"Half an hour. The Police response will be forty –three minutes at the earliest; the Swat teams response time is twenty minutes to this sector of the city, ten minutes to get up the cliff road since we set the demo charges on the main path, and it would take at least another thirteen minuets for them to assess the situation and decide that a SWAT response was warranted, presuming they started trying to work out what happened here the very second I triggered the general alarm."

"And you are sure the charges will ender the main path impassable?" he asked

Isha shrugged. "Not my department: Carlos is the ex-military one, but he seems pretty confident it will take out a transporter: with the access road blocked, they'll have to circle around and take the cliff path., it should take at least another ten minutes."

"So we need half an hour to complete the transmitter, and the difference between the police arriving thirteen minutes after we do, or breaking down our door with three minutes to spare is a middle-aged mall cop's estimate as to how long it would take the swat team to take the footpath?" Asked Baz, chewing the last morsel of his wrap thoughtfully. "I think mayhaps we need to take a more active interest in the verity of dear Carl's calculations."

"and If he's completed rigging the road for demolition?"

"Then we really don't need poor Carlos any more, do we? At least not un-droned"

Isha nodded. "I thought so; I'll send Marcus to deal with on him. Unless you want to do it yourself?"

"I may as well now I've eaten." Said Sandhurst, pushing back his chair. "Go and check on the researchers, I'll see to Carl. Where is he?" he asked, as Gamora begun to carefully ease her way back across the tiles towards the shelter of the wall: the dividing walls didn't go all the way to the curving roof of the complex, leaving a narrow loft-space where you could move from room to room. Wriggling back into the office opposite the canteen, she paused, listening.

"The sub-basement, sector 7g."

Gamora lowered her-self down the wall and then down into the office, cutting quietly across the room and opening a door into a corridor on the other side of the canteen to the door Baz had just walked out off. Checking the corridor was clear, she sprinted along parallel to Sandhurst and made it to the stairs before Baz had even reached the elevator in his corridor. As he sat and hummed to himself absently as he waited for the elevator, she shot down he stairs tow at a time and the very second the door's in front of him pinged open she was neatly cutting the fire-alarm cable on the sub-basement door and slipping into sector 8H. Checking the corridor quickly, she ripped a fire-evacuation plan off the wall and checked the layout of the floor as she jogged along.

Sector 7G was part of a community heating scheme, a long low concrete duct walled with insulated pipes of super-heated air that allowed the office complex to share its heating system with the condo's opposite, so all of them would have lower heating bills. It also meant that there was a single narrow trench running under the main road leading to the clifftop complex. A few ounces of plastic used correctly or even just a big tub on AmNFO and you could blow anything coming along the road sky-high and drop the roadway five-meters in one instant. It was on the schematics Nova had given them, but unless someone warned them, no one could reasonably expect it was rigged to blow.

Quietly, Gamora scooted into the service ducts, cursing the motion-sensitive low-maintenance lights that flickered on as she passed them. She'd have to hope that as he was working Carlos was moving enough to keep the light on, and wouldn't notice her approach.

Behind her came the rumble of an elevator moving down its shaft. She quickened her pace.

There.

Ducking down the duct, she trotted rapidly along. In the distance she could see a light flickering. Someone was moving over there. She readied the ceramic hairpin knife: if this Carlos was the only one who knew how to prepare the explosives, leaving him alive wasn't an option. She wasn't sure, but by the looks of it those drones could access your mind conscious or not, so less-lethal take downs were out. She checked the gun she had found on the suicided guard was still secure in the waistband of her skirt. She didn't plan anything as noisy or as random as a blaster, but it always paid to have a backup plan.

As she approached the flickering light, she began to feel increasingly on edge. The duct turned thought a tight angle at the end, and she couldn't see what was around that corner, but already she knew it was wrong: the bare concrete underfoot and faint pring! as each bulb fired up was giving away her approach even if the light wasn't, but she couldn't hear Carlo's working from round the corner. No grunting, no whistling, no swearing: either he was the quietest worker in the galaxy, or he'd realised she was there and was making a very, very deliberate effort to stay quiet.

Pausing ten passes from the corner, she re-sheathed the knife and put the hairpin back in her hair, and quietly let the safety of the blaster. She cut a length of clagging of the ducts, and wrapped it around the barrel to make an improvised suppressor. Not ideal, but if someone was waiting around the corner to ambush her then she was going around fast and hard, and with a damned firearm.

The rumble of the elevator got louder, as did the familiar strains of the girl from Ipanema epsilon six being played on panpipes. Drones and muzak. The harbingers' of doom she thought No time left to wait.

The second the elevator door pinged, Gamora spun around the corner of the duct, firing once into the ducting opposite her head, confident that the door-ping would cover the sound of the first shot. There was a blast of hot air, over-fierce, and she dipped under it and levelled her blaster at the shape around the corner.

The duct just stopped. Someone had welded a steel pressure-door shut just beyond the junction, the route just stopped where it should have meet up with the duct of the next building. There was no one there.

In fact the only thing moving at all was a drone, hovering in front of the motion sensor and wobbling slightly in the draft from the ruptured pipe. Someone had stuck a posty-film to it. It read.

Nice Try. Behind you. B.S.

"I'm afraid the talk in the canteen was largely for your benefit, Miss Gamora. I make it a point to learn the psychological profiles of anyone of interest I encounter and since you re-wired you skin to act as a lie detector, I made it a particular point not to underestimate you or your bionics. While Isha and her drones were searching the air-vents, I decided to weld up all the other possible exits. In doing so I noticed that it turned this duct into quite a nice dead-end. All we needed was to give you a good reason to come down here. Please pace the gun in the ducting level with your head, place your hands on your head and then step back from the gun keeping your feet at least a yard apart and with your toes turned in, please. Marcus here is quite an excellent shot."

Gamora froze up for a long moment, gun aimed at the drone in front of her. She then, slowly, making no sudden movements put the gun on top of the ducting by her head, put her hands on her head and stood back a few paces, as instructed, her hands folded neatly on top of the hairpin.

"Should I shoot her?" asked a rough voice, presumably Marcus.

"Probably, but I find myself curious as to how one of these so-called 'Guardians of the Galaxy' was able to resist the effects of the mind control. It warrants further study. Take her to the lab, and then shoot her. In the knees. Get her contained and I'll deal with it later.

"You'd better just shoot me now, and blow this duct in top of me. Otherwise the police will roll up that driveway before you can finish your main transmitter, whatever that's for, and they'll start breaking it, along with my friends at about the same time I get out of containment because I can attest." She said, staring dead ahead at the Drone "That I do not intend to be contained."

Baz Sandhurst laughed, quietly and musically, like a school-teacher. "Young lady, firstly, I welcome the police with open arms, in fact I plan on it. Don't presume anything I said in that canteen was any more genuine than the sculpted protein in that wrap. And secondly, the people who built this containment suite designed it to hold things not naturally given to containment. I'm not saying it's escape-proof because that's just tempting fate, given the one individual to ever make it out of an identical one. Joseph assures has made improvements since then, but still I severely doubt that if any of your little ragtag team could get out, that it would be you."

"What's that supposed to mean?" she asked, trying to buy time, hoping that one or both of them would step within blade range. Her brow wrinkled. "Who's Joseph?" Baz sighed, disappointed.

"Daughter of the rogue Titan Thanos, master assassin, and most dangerous woman in the galaxy, by some accounts. I'd expected better, really. Do you know the first thing about the people you ride with? If you did, would you feel so safe, I wonder?" he said, as Marcus ordered her around, and marched her back towards the elevator. The drone, annoyingly, kept pace hovering right in front of her eyes, the dammed posty-film mocking her. As was something else, a sense of familiarity about that name.

Marcus forced her into the lift, and told her to put her palms on the walls. He had a gun to her head, so she did. Marcus got into the elevator next to her, and then looked back to Sandhurst. He laughed.

"Yes, I'll just get into a confined space with one of the galaxy's top assassins, giving me no room to use my drones and where we'll get in each other way in a fight, Shall I? You know what, I'll take the stairs."

"Wait, Joseph is a terran name, does this have something to do with Peter-" she started

There was a flash of blue-grey light, and the drone in front of her zoomed forward and gently head-butted her, like a cat, and all thought basically stopped for a moment.

Sandhurst watched impassively for a while, and then nodded to Marcus.

"If she's like the other, she'll be compliant for less than a minute. Wait until I get to the ground floor and call you before you close yourself in a lift with her. Got that?"

Marcus nodded, and waited until Baz was up the stairs' and out of sight before eagerly slipping into the lift and hitting the close-door button. No sooner than the door was closed, than he dropped his gaze to Gamora's skirt. "Less than a minute huh?" he muttered to himself, running his thumb up and down her thigh, before shrugging and hitting the lift emergency stop.

"Boy, are you going to be in for a shock when you get your mind back." He said, so distracted fumbling with his belt he didn't even notice the growing smell of burning electronics.

"Not as much as you are." said Gamora, a second before he looked up shocked and the drone sitting on her head exploded. Thanos had firm beliefs about proprietary software systems with aggressive anti-hacking, and nothing was too good for his daughters when their bionics were concerned. No sooner than the drone had docked with her systems Gamora had been in control of its power-core and ready to fry it, firewall being a word that Thanos took as literally as Drax.

As he went back screaming, Gamora was already reaching for the hair-pin knife only to find that the blast had knocked it to the floor. She settled for turning the upward movement of her arm into a whipping elbow that caught Marcus in the eye, the one that already had a two-inch sherd of drone-casing embedded into it. This did not do the job as planned, and he yowled like a tomcat and slammed the butt of his rifle into her jaw, making her bite her tongue and filling her mouth with blood. Rather than give him another opening, she spat the blood in his good eye and grabbed the gun with both hands, pulling for just long enough to get him to pull back with his weight, before suddenly shoving when he was already learning back to pull.

This sent him stumbling back, and while it may have floored someone in open ground, he just bounced of the wall of the elevator and came right back at her cursing in a way that clashed horribly with the elevator music.

Awesome Mix tape Vol2: George Michel: Careless Whisper(Muzak version)

Gamora reached for the blade, but as he did he jumped her from the side and slammed her head into the wall panel again and again, managing to light up every single button on the elevator control before she got the blade out of the sheath and, throwing the sheath in his face for the hell of it, lunged at his head. He turned aside and shifted his grip onto her arms as she used her enhanced cyborg strength to slowly force the blade toward his one good eye, and just as she was about to nick him and deliver the toxin he used his body weight to pick her up and slam her against the wall relatedly, getting close enough to her for smell his cheap cologne as he turned his body sideways and trapped the blade between his bulk and the wall. Trapping the blade, he begun to slam into her and try to get an arm free to punch her, forcing her to drop the blade and suddenly step sideways to avoid the ceramic cutting her bare feet. It was a stupid move on his part: there wasn't room to punch.

So she bit into his ear, and as he yelled and squirmed she just focused on getting her arm wriggled underneath his so she had a grip across his throat. Laying her palm flat against his collarbone to get the leverage she needed to pull up and rip his ear off, she them kicked the knife away from her as he stumbled back, hoping he's tread on it and cut himself. No such luck. He bounced back off the wall swinging, but she kept her guard high and got close, went for the throat and got a grip under his and begun to throttle him and knee him repeatedly in the groin, obliging him to raise a leg to shield himself, allowing her to easily of-balance and shove him. She gave him a quick finger-tip jab to the throat making him gag and then flicked her hand up, cracking his jaw up and tilting him back into his old friend the wall. She would have finished him them, but she slipped on some blood, she didn'6tt know whose, and he kicked her in the side so hard it winded her. As she staggered back getting her breath he could have finished her, but like most people who have been trained with guns went for a weapon instead of pressing the attack.

He grabbed the gun and turned it to fire, but she felt her bod-mods flood her blood with oxygen in response to her breathing problems and she sidestepped as he fired, blowing a hole the size of a fist in the walls and filling the air with the burning metal and ozone stink of plasma weaponry. She stepped inside the reach of her opponent so the gun was between he two of them and she was facing him side on, placed one hand on the top of the gun to control it, ignoring how the coil burnt her palm, and slammed the heal of her other hand into his nose as she turned (unfortunately failing to drive the cartilage into his brain when it popped out into his eye instead), twisting the gun and him apart and, now that he was basically standing behind her, stamping hard his instep as she elbowed him in the gut before slamming her fist up into his nose again and then elbowing him in the groin as he doubled over .

He would, however, not let go of the gun even as he fell to his knees, which is why she was forced to step behind him still maintaining her grip on it, and kick his legs out forwards in front of him so he couldn't roll forwards and throw her now she moved behind him, and pulled the gun up under his chin and across his windpipe as he repeatedly punched her in the ribs in an attempt to make her stop.

Strangulation is not a precise or reliable form of killing, just ask your friendly neighbourhood assassin. Blades, bombs, guns, defenestration, yes. Strangulation, no. But you use what you have to hand. Electrical cables, the drawstrings from blinds, bed robes, towels.

Gun barrels.

The trick is to just not think about it, and keep going long, long after you're sure their dead. Turn your back on them and if they wake up again, it's at best embarrassing, and that's assuming they don't shoot your or give a good description to the cops later. Just because they've stopped kicking doesn't mean jack shit. And speaking of shit, they'll generally empty their bladder and bowels before death when strangulated, so that's not a reliable measure either, whatever people say. Best not to evens start on the massive asphyxiation erection if your subject is male, either.

It's just generally safest to go on until you're sure you've crushed their larynx. Even with a pool cue or an iron bar or a rifle, this can take a while. Long enough for the Muzak to have cycled back to Girl from Ipanema buy the time Marcus gave one final kick of his rapidly disintegrating boots on the blood-and-urine slicked floor and died and ejaculated, in that order, because the biology or death is an undignified as it is interesting.

Gamora leaned against the wall, and clutched her battered ribs and panted for a very long time, trying and failing to get her breath back. After a while she noticed the gun in her hands, and set it down, gently. She then began to check herself over for damage, seeing if in her adrenaline rush she had injured herself worse than she'd thought. Aside from a scary moment when she found a long-ragged strip of flesh on her cheek that on closer examination turned out not to be hers at all but the errant severed ear, it was as she'd suspected: scrapes, bruises, no broken ribs thank the gods, because some on the ship actually needed to be able to bend to reach food on the bottom shelf, a nasty burn to the top of her head where the drone has exploded, which explained the smell of burnt hair. Alive, and still operating and combat ready.

It just really, really hurt was all.

Stepping carefully to avoid the worst of the blood, she shifted over Marcus's body and, gingerly, pulled her knife up from the floor. It was surprisingly difficult: the blood on the floor had already congealed to tacky, and her palms were sweating so much it was hard to get a good grip as she re-sheathed it. She then went over and checked the gun. The main plasma coil had got covered in blood, and it would be the devil's own work to clean it off, but so long as she could stomach the smell, it should burn itself clean in a few shots. She did a quick inventory of the tiny room to check if there was anything else of use she could take. She tried to ignore the bump, bump bump of something suspiciously not-birdlike beating against the doors of the lift on the floor below, where she'd got on. It looked like either Baz or his drones had noticed she'd never made it to the floor she was meant to. She checked her watch. Making it down to the basement, the fight, and recovery, had taken nearly half an hour. Whatever plan Baz was putting into place, it was happening round about now.

She'd just about finished taking stock of her merger inventory when her eyes fell on her dead guy. For such a large man, he had surprisingly small feet. Curious, she grabbed a boot and, ignoring the wet patch on the inner trouser leg, lulled it up and checked the bottom of the soul. A size 10 male, which she guessed would make him an 8.5 female. Not quite her size but close. His boots were covered in blood, and the heals had been mostly worn away in the last few minutes of his life as he'd kicked frantically, but it was still better that running around barefoot or recovering her ridiculous heals.

"Two billion terrorists in the galaxy and I have the good luck to kill one with feet the size of my sister." She said, pulling them on and lacing up. She paused. That was weirdly close to one of the lines in one of Peter's stupid terran action films.

She grinned.

The doors to the elevator on the ground floor of the research centre pinged open and immediately four drones zoomed in and begun to bludgeon the figure standing inside. Baz Sandhurst turned away from the garden to the office, now covered in a drifting pal of smoke and, in a reflexive action that owed nothing to thought, fired the last shots of his blaster at it. This meant that Carlos and two of the swat officers began firing into it as well, shredding the figure and all four of the drones before Baz realised that no matter how many times he shot it, the figure didn't fall. Annoyed, he sent a mental pulse to the cops and the stood down, the Drones embedded in their skulls bleeping. Carols, still 100% un-augmented idiot, kept blazing away until Baz walked over to him and screamed in his ear for him to stop.

He nodded to the figure.

"Cut that down." he said, grimacing distastefully at Marcus's shredded body, still hanging from the light-fitting by a bunch of trailing cables and, it tuned out on close examination, an inline bowline knot and his head. His bare feet were dangling a foot above the floor, except the one that seemed to have fallen off when shot

As he was cut down, Carlos considered whether or not he should sneak of and just quit this job, because Baz was acting weird and things were heating up nastily. He was looking for an excuse to get out, if he was honest with himself, and if he tried, he could take this as a sign.

It was then he saw the writing on the wall.

"Hey Baz, check out this writing." He called, backing away nervously.

Baz Sandhurst, walking back to direct the SWAT team firefighting in the garden, turned to tell Carlos to shut up, and then did double take when he was the words. At first he thought she'd actually been mad enough to with them in the Xandanain's blood, before he realised it was just blue marker pen. He guessed that what you lost in intimidation you made up for in legibility.

He looked at the words, and felt a deep sense of horror, unease and, if he was honest, plain annoyance.

"'Ho ho ho, now I have a plasma rifle'…. What the fuck does 'Ho ho ho' mean? Is this some sort of inside joke I'm supposed to get? No wonder Nova Prime won't give these lunatics their own coin, they're all crazy!" he said, firing his rifle into the floor and roof of the elevator, just in case someone was hiding there. The was an explosion form outside, and he hesitated, torn between the elevator and the fight outside.

"Bugger it. If you see the woman kill her. We don't have time for this shit." He said, stomping off. Carlos and his drone-puppets followed him.

In the elevator, noting moved exempt the dripping of Marcus carcass for some time. Then the fingers hanging barely visibly onto the edge of the fist sized hole the plasma rife had punched into the wall moved, and then grunting, and the boot of a toe poked thought the hole from the outside, and there was a clatter a Gamora lifted herself onto the shredded roof and, after a moment, lowered herself thought the emergency hatch, gun steadied.

She was confused. She didn't understand what could have possibly happed to distract Baz sufficiently that he had better things to do that hunt the assassin loose in his building.

And then the ugly corporate sculpture in the centre of the garden exploded and blew all the windows out, bating Gamora in tiny flecks of safety glass and the high bird-like chattering of gun owned by someone who genuinely believed that energy weapons were for pussies, use a frickin' kinetic slug, ya moron. Also, unless she was seeing things, some of the landscaping shrubbery seemed to be fighting the cops.

Nodded, sagely. "Diversion. That would do it." She trotted off towards the sound of screams and shattering glass. It wouldn't do to let Rocket and Drax have all the fun.

And besides, she hadn't got to use the dagger yet.