Chapter 15. The Complications Mount
Great Britain, the United States, and, strangely enough, North Korea had allied in the effort to put an end to the young upstart, Jack Spicer. Navies from all countries had mobilized, battling the SMART bots over the oceans to reduce civilian casualties, as well as to put the SMARTs at a disadvantage: they lost much dexterity once in the air. Every European country with ships remaining set out against the SMARTs, and the US and Britain used their nuclear arms freely over the Atlantic.
Dozens and dozens of battleships and aircraft carriers dotted the ocean, set upon by hundreds of SMART bots of all sizes. Fighter jets zipped among them, but there was little they could do. Occasionally, a tracking missile would detonate on a SMART, but those only damaged the Mini SMARTs. The regular bots required something armed with a nuclear warhead to be destroyed.
"Die, you rebel scum!" Jack screamed, unleashing rounds on a battleship as he swooped over it in a bot. His SMART had the phrase "Evil Can Be Most Rewarding" stenciled in huge black letters over the booster jet, like a giant bumper sticker. He drove the SMART into the water with a massive splash, heading for a British aircraft carrier. Pushing a series of lit buttons, he called four Mini Bots to follow him. He cranked a switch and the SMART's drill started up. He closed in on the broad side of the carrier, while torpedoes made the whole form of the SMART shudder and screech. He saw a Mini bot explode out the corner of his eye. And still he closed in on the ship. Just as the bot retracted its wing…Suddenly his vision was engulfed in darkness; he saw the innards of the ship, massive engines stretching into darkness in both directions. Steam engulfed the bot as the drill ripped through the hull. Water was pouring all around and sparks jumped and flickered everywhere. Then, he sliced through the other side of the ship, with a bone-rattling jolt. The SMART slowed considerably as it reentered the water, but managed to propel itself away quickly enough before the aircraft carrier began to bleed fuel and rip apart from the interior explosions.
Jack put his head back with a sigh of relief.
"That was close," he muttered, seeing that all four of his Mini SMARTs had been destroyed in the attack. He burst up from the water again and the bot's wings shot out to take it to the air. A light was blinking in the top corner of the control panel, warning him of the damage done to the bot.
"So much for indestructible armor," Jack muttered. "Well, I guess that's what you get when you get it for free!"
The Mother SMART hovered near the edge of the atmosphere, overseeing the whole ordeal. Meg was up there, monitoring and sending all the SMARTs updates of enemy locations by the minute. Meg, they discovered, could communicate quite well with machines, as she could think almost as fast as they could when she went into bullet-time. Through the long windows of the control deck, the battle below looked only like a series of shimmering flashes and puffs of smoke, blotted out from time to time by a passing cloud.
Meg sent a signal to the abandoned Godzilla bot to wake up and attack North Korea. She received a message back telling her that, though the Godzilla was on its was to North Korea, the Japanese navy had secretly sent out a number of battleships that had been kept a secret from the world for quite some time. One, known as the Yamato II, was already out in the Pacific and preparing to engage the SMARTs on the Pacific.
"What is this? World War Two all over again?" Meg exclaimed, coming out of bullet-time.
SMART 4439R destroyed, the computer's indifferent voice informed her.
"Another one?" Meg cried out. "We've already lost, like, sixty of them in the last two hours!" She pushed a button and leaned over the control panel to contact Jack. "Mother ship to Jack! We've got a problem! They seemed to have figured out how to take out the SMARTs! Should I call in reinforcements from land duty?"
There was a pause as Jack cleared away from the fighting so he could concentrate on his message.
"No! We can't give those counties an inch!"
"Japan already sent out battleships!"
"What the hell!" Jack just about shrieked. "Tokyo's going to be such a memory!"
"Forget about that, Jack!" Meg went on. "We're down forty nine Mini SMARTs and twelve regulars! There are only fifty Mini's left fighting down there, and your in one of ten regular bots!"
"Call Patience! Why didn't you call her sooner? We have to…"
"Jack, I've been calling her! I can't find her anywhere! I've sent her about 200 e-mails, I've left a humiliating number of messages: I can't contact her!"
Meg heard Jack shouting profanities under the roar of enemy fire and sputter of a machine gun as he passed it. She glimpsed another bright flash miles below on the steel blue of the sea, but it was quickly obscured by a column of smoke.
WARNING- CONTACT IN TEN SECONDS"Contact!" Meg shouted. "Contact with what?"
She lunged forward and looked down. Four missiles, each armed with a nuke, were spiraling up towards the Mother SMART. A number of faithful Minis and regulars rushed to engage and detonate them, but the missiles actually dodged.
FIVE SECONDS TO CONTACT
Meg broke into bullet-time. She sent commands to all the SMARTs within her control, but somehow their speed didn't match that of the missiles'.
"Jack! I've got four nukes coming straight at me!"
When she received no response for what felt like a good few minutes, she realized that Jack couldn't have possible understood anything she said. So, taking a deep breath, Meg returned to normal time and quickly repeated the message.
"They can't touch the Mother ship!" Jack boasted. "It's a flying city!"
THREE, TWO, ONE…
Meg returned to bullet time, knowing that it didn't take much to destroy a city.
"There's something suspicious going on here," she muttered as she ran from the control deck towards the docking bays. She had to pass through two arcades and a tennis court to get to the bay, but once there she discovered that all the SMARTS were out, save a single Mini SMART. Hopping aboard, she heard the screech as a missile ripped into the front of the Mother ship, probably right where she had been standing. The Mini dropped out from its dock, but Meg realized that, to her horror, SMARTs can think as fast as she can, but they can't physically move that fast.
"Aw, hell."
Racing from the battlefield, even though it was a sea, Jack headed straight up towards the Mother. He saw SMARTs dashed aside by the intent missiles, and he was taken aback when they successfully blasted the front off the bot. The Mother SMART was a six-legged affair with engines to boot, so loosing its face, so to speak, wouldn't bring it down.
The shock wave from the four combined nukes repelled all the SMARTs, including Jack's, like birds dashed off a windshield. Jack spotted Meg's Mini SMART falling away, too, so he chased after it.
"They may have won this battle," Jack snapped as he called off his remaining SMARTs, "but I will win in the end!"
He sped after Meg's bot, which she couldn't control as it had been severely damaged in the explosion. He saw Meg go into bullet-time when she vanished like an illusion and landed suddenly on his blast shield. He opened it just long enough for her to drop in, which really isn't much time at all.
"They're following us," Jack told Meg as she took the co-pilot's seat. "Those fighter jets."
"So? Blow them up!"
"Meg, there's something different about these jets," Jack said, turning a barrel roll to evade a rocket. "Haven't you noticed?"
"The missiles that hit the Mother were dodging the SMARTs no problem," Meg recalled.
Jack looked at her with an expression that told her to figure it out.
"And Patience is missing," he said bluntly. "I think she double-crossed us!"
"What?" Meg cried out. "She wouldn't! Miss Seek hates them!"
"Do ya think? Or did she just start a war to sell her weapons to the biggest names in the business?" Jack arched one eyebrow and the SMART turned a somersault to fall behind the fighter jets.
Meg, for one, couldn't accept the thought.
"I don't get it…Why would she…?" A thought occurred to her then. "Wait. Miss Seek is missing, right? Maybe they aren't moving faster? Maybe we're just moving slower?"
Jack looked at her quizzically.
"You're all about things moving faster and slower, aren't you?"
"No, I mean it! All the SMARTs are ultimately under Miss Seek's control, right? Well, what if something's happened to her and she's not around to, I don't know, upkeep them? Maybe they don't work as well without her maintaining them from another control center?"
"Now there's a technical flaw if I ever saw one!" Jack roared. He pushed a red button and took out a few of the jets, but the rest dodged right away. "That's it! I don't want them following us!" He sent out tracking missiles to chase the jets away for the time being.
Eventually, Jack and his remaining SMARTs made their way to South America, where they met back up with the practically bleeding Mother SMART.
"I wouldn't know where to begin fixing that thing," Jack admitted. "I've got nearly two decades of building machines and breaking them to fix them under my belt, but I've never worked on anything that big and that complex before!"
About a hundred SMARTs were lined up a few miles from a city in southern Brazil, near the edge of a rainforest that had been undergoing clear-cutting until Jack waged war with Earth. The Mother bot was standing on five legs, and weakly holding up one that had lost a talon, still sparking in places. It cast a shadow miles long, and was probably visible from, oh, Venezuela.
Jack, viewing the damage from atop a standing regular SMART, didn't notice the little camo-jeep that rolled through the trees as stealthily as it could. It had Brazilian a license plate, but the sniper riding in the back was a U.S. Marine.
Meg, one SMART away, saw the movement in the trees below. She slipped into bullet time entirely on accident, simply because she was surprised. She noticed something in the air, silently sliding along. She realized, around Mach 2, that it was a bullet, aimed precisely at Jack.
Instantly Meg literally bounded into action.
"Light!" she cried out. With one powerful leap, she sprung from one SMART to the next, knowing that she could only move so fast, and that she might not make it in time. Reaching out, she collided with Jack in slow motion. The bullet was just a foot away from his head, and Meg looked over her shoulder to watch it slide by, like a tiny little train on an invisible track. She could see the air tearing around it and falling away in ripples.
Like a record picking up speed, she returned to normal time and heard the gunshot.
Jack looked around frantically, having never seen Meg come over. To him, it seemed she had been fired out of a gun.
"Someone's trying to kill you!" she screamed, pointing towards the forest.
"Yeah, that happens to me more and more these days," Jack admitted passively. "Hey, wait! Did you just…?"
Meg nodded sharply, wide-eyed at how close his brush with death had been.
"SMART bots! Destroy them!" Jack ordered, pointing into the trees. As a pair of Mini SMARTs descended on the unlucky assassins, Jack turned back to Meg.
"We have got to find Patience! In the meantime, you are now officially my personal body guard!"
A SMART that had not been damaged in the battle approached at Jack's command, and he and Meg jumped in. Jack sent out orders to the SMARTs to move out to previously conquered countries and continue to quell rebellions.
"Obviously we need to find Patience," Meg picked up, "but that's what we've been trying to do for, like, three days!"
"I know that!" Jack snapped back. He tapped his chin for a moment. "Wait, here's an idea." He pushed a button and typed in a command to the SMART's computer. "I'm gonna have it take us straight to Patience. Her SMARTs must have some way of finding her. You know that watch she wears…"
'LOCATION UNKNOWN' the computer replied.
"Crap," Jack murmured. "…Well, there's still one person we haven't asked!"
"Who? God?"
"No," Jack replied slowly. "Though, that's certainly worth a shot if this doesn't work. Who's the one person Patience seems to always complain about? And who's the one person who always seems to know something about everyone?"
Meg slouched slightly and rolled her eyes.
"Oh. Him. I don't wanna ask him. He won't help us."
Jack shook his head.
"Oh, yes he will! He will if we beat the soup out of him!"
Meg stared at Jack as they headed west towards China once again. She shook her head slowly.
"You really don't need to edit your boasts just because I'm twelve," she told him. "Just say it: He will if we beat the shit out of him. I know that's what you meant."
Jack looked at her with his head cocked to the side, a bit vacant.
"No, I meant soup."
After a few hours of cruising over the Pacific and keeping a safe distance from the Japanese armada, Jack and Meg were back in China once more. Jack flew the SMART right into the Land of Nowhere, and stood it just outside the fearsome entrance to Chase's palace. Meg waited in the cockpit, listening to her headphones, while Jack jumped out and approached the front gates.
"Why am I knocking?" he wondered out loud as he slammed his fist on the huge gates a few times. "I don't answer to anybody."
But, as Jack stood there and scratched the back of his head in total silence, it seemed Chase wasn't answering, either.
"Open up, Chase!" Jack hollered. "I hafta find Patience!"
No response.
Jack was about to begin threatening to bust the whole palace to pieces with his SMARTs, until a novel thought occurred to him. He glanced down at his watch, which adjusted for time zones automatically.
"Oh…" he said quietly. "It's three in the morning here."
Turning around, Jack tiptoed away from the gate, knowing what bad luck it is to wake a sleeping dragon.
"No luck," Jack said as he jumped back into the driver's seat of his SMART.
"Huh?"
"I have a feeling that if I wake Chase up at this hour, he'll probably chomp my head off without even pausing to hear me scream." Jack looked up sharply, realizing that that sentence didn't come out at all like he had intended.
"Well, good," said Meg. "Why would he know where Seek is, anyway? He's so secluded, he probably doesn't even know that you're halfway done taking over the world!"
As the SMART started up again and walked from Chase's palace, Jack drummed his fingers on the hand rest.
"Where would I go if I was an evil genius mechanic?"
"You are an evil genius mechanic," said Meg.
Jack paused and stared into space.
"And, a single, thirty-four-year-old woman, and… a manic dentist…" he added choppily.
Meg yawned and got up to lay down across the two back seats.
"I don't know. A suicide hot-line?"
"A suicide hot-line?" Jack repeated, twisting around in his chair to give Meg a quick glance.
"Yeah, you know: dentists get suicidal because every one is s afraid of them and hates them. Dentophobia?"
Jack rolled his eyes and leaned over the controls. He fired up the booster, and the SMART took its running launch.
"Wouldn't that just be the icing?" he muttered. He thought for a moment. "But, Patience is evil, so she likes everyone hating her."
"Okay, so she's hanging out with Simon," Meg suggested.
"Simon?"
"American Idol? The guy who hates everyone."
"Thanks for reminding me, Meg. I still have to go step on a bunch of celebrities. Actually, you know what? Let's take a break from conquering countries! Let's just go raid malls and steal Disney World!"
Meg brightened instantly at the idea and jumped up from the chairs.
"Yeah! Let's empty out a Six Flags and go on as many rides as we want! And then, let's pop national monuments up and swap them around! Let's switch the Eiffel Tower with the Statue of Liberty, and then put that enormous Jesus statue right smack in the middle of Mecca! Ooh, and then, and then, let's move every single building in Austin, Texas, to the South Pole!"
Jack had to look up at Meg sharply at this last one.
"Or, we could just go stomp on all the mansions in Beverly Hills and rearrange the 'Holly Wood' sign to spell 'Wooly Hold,' or 'Dooly Whol' or 'Moldy Loo."
"Moldy Loo?"
"Turn the 'W' upside down and get rid of the 'H'," Jack explained.
"You've had a lot of time to think about this, haven't you?"
"Well, duh!" Jack exclaimed. "I've only been plotting my revenge on the world since I was, like, six!"