Scene 10

"Oooo-kay. Martha suddenly seems like a better idea." Fargo pushed back from the computer and stood up. "Let's get upstairs and see what's happening."

Within minutes, the entire group was gathered in Section 1, watching the giant monitors. Fargo was playing with the controls, getting the cameras to zoom in on the town. Standing in the back, Jo couldn't help remembering the day she'd watched Larry's rocket blow up her house from this very room. Losing her house and all of her belongings should have made it one of the worst days of her life.

And it was, of course. But…she'd also saved Zane from going to prison, and he had called her Jo-jo and smiled at her in that mischievous way he had. Remembering it now, she couldn't stop a reluctant smile from tugging at her lips. What had he said? "You hate that? You hate that…" and she'd known then that he'd call her Jo-jo again just for the pleasure of teasing her. And just as it had made her smile then, it was making her smile now.

She glanced at him. He was the most annoying person she'd ever known, in any universe. And she was helplessly, hopelessly, madly in love with him. She looked away as soon as he turned his head to look at her, but not quite quickly enough. He saw that she'd been smiling and he was smart enough to know that meant she was relenting. He looked down but his own lips were also curving in a smile.

"I'm going to get down there and try to get people off the streets, see if I can calm things down." Carter took one last look at the monitor, shaking his head, and then hurried out of the room.

"Jo, earth to Jo." Fargo impatiently pulled Jo out of her reverie. "Let's get Martha out there. I don't think we have time to come up with a better solution."

Jo nodded, grabbing a handheld and quickly texting instructions to Martha. She typed the last digits of her security code—the numbers that authorized Martha to follow her instructions—and then glanced at Zane, who had been watching her. "If Martha starts behaving oddly, I'll know who to blame," she said, but the words weren't delivered with any animosity.

He shrugged. "Hacker instinct," he said, tacitly admitting that he'd caught her password. "I promise I won't use my illicitly-gained knowledge."

"I know you won't." Jo looked away. She'd read the files. This Zane had done a lot of stupid pranks. And her own alter-ego had seemed to delight in over-reacting. She didn't—couldn't—truly know what had been going on, since she hadn't been here. But the part of her that instinctively understood people and their dynamics was pretty sure that she and Zane been trapped in a dysfunctional attention cycle, where he acted like an ass because negative attention was better than no attention, and she over-reacted, because admitting her attraction to a rebel was impossible. There was no way that she was falling into that trap again. Besides, she'd given him a perpetual free pass by reason of insanity. That meant that even if he did mess with Martha, she'd find a way to fix it.

"Is it me you trust or him?" His eyes were dark, his voice annoyed.

Jo glanced back at him. Oh. Now where did that come from? She frowned.

"There we go!" Fargo's voice was exultant.

Everyone's eyes turned towards the monitors. The dull black metal body of the drone was skimming through the air, entering the chaos above Main Street. Jo noticed that Carter had made it there first, and was exiting his parked car at the same moment. He must have broken every speed limit in the state.

The bats' bodies were small, their wings like giant kites stretched out to either side. But they ranged in size from biggish for a bat—about three feet across—to truly gigantic. Jo tried to count. It looked to her as if there were four of the gigantic bats, perhaps half a dozen that were mid-sized, and another dozen or so that were smallish. That wasn't actually that many, but seeing them all swarming and circling together made it seem like more.

A flash of blue light and a bat was flailing in the air, one wing damaged. A second flash and the bat was dropping out of the sky like a dirty brown rag. A gigantic dirty brown rag.

Martha circled around, aiming at a second of the giant bats. One, two, three shots, and it too was down, out of the sky, landing on a parked car and then sliding off and down to the street, lying still and dead.

For the first few minutes, Martha had unrelenting success. Bat after bat dropped out of the sky. But the little bats were more maneuverable than the big ones. Martha fired—and missed, the shot flaring into the side of a building and sending brick chips flying.

"Whoa, that's not good," Fargo was chewing his fingernails as he watched the monitors.

"Come on, Martha," Jo murmured. "You can do it."

The bats braked, separated, fluttered, stopped, shot up and then down. Martha couldn't keep up with their angling. She spun again, shot again, missed again.

Fargo hissed as her shot took out a streetlight.

"This isn't working," Jo was frowning, trying to calculate the angles of the shots Martha was taking. She was behind the bats, and that wasn't working. She needed to be above the bats. But Martha couldn't fire in a downward direction unless she got high enough to angle herself downward—and given how fast she flew, that was way too high to get a solid shot at a target that small.

Martha had taken out the big bats—those were the easy ones. She'd gotten most of the mid-sized bats. But the little ones were too fast and too agile. She shot, again and again and again.

"Uh-oh," muttered Zane.

"What?" Jo heard his mutter.

"Does she have that emotional attachment patch? I think she's getting frustrated."

Martha fired. And fired again. Automatically, Jo calculated the shot—and knew immediately that Zane was right. Martha was taking shots with no chance of success because she was annoyed.

"We need to pull her back," Jo snapped. Immediately, she got on the handheld and started typing, and then, frustrated, used the telephone function instead. "Come back to GD, Martha," she ordered.

Martha fired off another shot. Again, it went wild, this time hitting a tree.

"Martha, listen to me. Come back to GD." Jo was being firm with the drone.

"There's still half a dozen bats out there," Fargo protested. "We don't know what they can do."

"No, but we do know what Martha can do," Zane was watching the monitors. He cringed as another shot missed a bat, the blue fire smashing through a store window.

Almost all the people were off the street, but Carter was still out there, running from one straggler to the next.

"We have to stop the bats," Fargo insisted.

"Martha, come back to GD," Jo ordered again.

Martha spun, twirled, took another shot. A little bat hung in front of her, almost as if it was taunting her, and she fired, fired, fired again, just as the bat dropped below her, and then slid behind her. The shots took out Carter's jeep in a beautiful flare of blue light that subsided to leave behind only another wreck of a car.

"Oh, not again," moaned Fargo. "His car insurance is practically a line item in the budget."

"Martha, I know you're annoyed," Jo started trying to talk the drone down, using her most soothing voice. "It's not your fault. Those bats use echolocation. They can tell when you're behind them. You can't shoot straight down and that's what needed here. So it's not your fault and you need to calm down and come home to GD. You did a great job, truly great, you got the big guys. Now you need to come home…"

Jo could tell from the drone's body language on the screen when she'd succeeded. Martha slowed, then stopped, stood still for a moment, then started rising. Jo took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

"How are we going to stop the last bats?" Fargo asked. "From the way they're breaking glass, it's obvious they're still dangerous."

"We need to be able to attack them from above." As Martha headed back toward GD, away from Main Street, Jo closed her phone and gazed at the screen.

"We need to drop towels on them," Fargo said gloomily. "The internet says that's the way to catch them."

Jo bit her lip, thinking hard. She turned to Zane. "Do you still have that beanbag gun?"

Zane knew exactly what she was talking about: the testing gun in Dr. Parrish's lab. "Down in the nullwep lab, yeah."

"That blanket you had last night—if we fired one of those out of the beanbag gun, would it open?"

Zane thought for a minute. "You have to shake it, but being shot out of a gun—especially a gun not designed for that kind of bullet…yeah, that ought to work. It should cycle enough to open."

Jo was beginning to smile. "Last question—the SkyCruiser. Working?"

Zane grinned back at her. "Yep."

"You get the cruiser, I'll get the gun and the ammo. Let's go hunt some bats!"