Chapter 41:
"Lollipop," called a familiar voice. The tall candy person ignored that call. With the coming storm, business with the colony was becoming critical, and she feared they were running out of time, even though summer was still at its height.
There was a lot of sickness this summer. People who'd lived on an isolated rock in the depths of space for centuries were now finding they had no defense against the myriad toxins and diseases of the world their ancestors left.
"Lollipop," the voice called, "are you down here?"
It would've been a delight if the humans' leaders could be focused on solving some of the fundamental problems instead of bickering over things that couldn't be changed.
With Bill gone, the sandhogs had quit working. They were holding out for guarantees, when the whole town was fighting for its survival. If that wasn't enough, there were idiots wandering out past the outer line of defenses and getting into trouble.
We need more medicine, the Seneschal thought. We need more of that dehydrated food that Lamprey Princess gave us. Those were all things she'd have to take up with Finn the next time they talked.
"Lollipop," called the Mayor's Wife. Lollipop Mertens responded, "in here..." Tasha Stanek stepped into the storage room to find the skinny ex-model standing amidst boxes and bales, while looking at a list.
"What's going on," Tasha asked? "Hmm," Lollipop responded? "I said, 'what's going on,'," Tasha repeated. "Tania couldn't come in the water gate. It's closed."
With a shrug, Lollipop responded, "rumors of some trouble in the south, dear. Finn asked me to close the water gate for a while and put guards on the docks. It's nothing to worry about. I expect this'll blow over in a few days."
"Oh," Tasha burbled. "I... you didn't say anything." Glancing over her shoulder, Lollipop smiled and responded, "sorry. Busy with the list of supplies for the winter. We need more dehydrated food and some more medicine. I need to get upstairs and get an order for supplies in."
Pausing in thought, the tall candy person added, "I better call Kara and Frieda. I'm sure the southern colony needs supplies too." "Y-yes, of course," Tasha agreed. "We can't be too careful!"
Turning to face the Mayor's wife, Lollipop queried, "what was it you wanted, dear?" "Oh," Tasha replied, "it's five o'clock. Dinner is being served..." "Oh, dear me," Lollipop burbled! "I forgot!"
Taking Tasha by the hand, the tall woman steered her back out of the storeroom. As they went up the hall, she was already talking about the dessert they were going to have with dinner.
On the far side of the world, the sun was already climbing the sky for morning. The air was crisp around Betty, in spite of the season. Summer in the frozen north of the former Russia reminded Betty a great deal of summer in Denmark, when she and Simon lived course, if Betty was having flashbacks to the past, it seemed she wasn't alone. The Nine-Tailed Fox had been moody since the plane landed, and she'd spent a lot of time lost in thought, staring up the valley.
Just now, the kitsune was up on the rock again, staring out at the valley, her eyes gone soul-searchy. The valley reminded Betty Mertens of the place the Nine-Tailed Fox had called home the last ten centuries, so she couldn't help wondering if that was the problem.
Shiyan village was more or less gone—erased from the map to eliminate the deadly secret Katsumi Tsui had spent the last thousand years guarding. Though a replica had been built on King's Island, Betty couldn't help but think that was only a pale imitation.
Seeing the kitsune having 'a moment', Betty couldn't help wallowing in her own unpleasant memories. Her path was just as checkered as Katsumi's, with her choices driving some starkly unpleasant outcomes.
She'd given up the little flat in Copenhagen to chase Simon through the time portal into the future. That was for the good, since she didn't end up being slagged with the rest of the population.
On the flipside of the coin, she'd ended up losing Simon to her own hubris and lust for power. Her choice to push him to fight for the Grandmaster's crown had put him in harm's way.
More to the point, she'd done a lot of damage to Simone and Finn's relationship, damage she feared would never heal.
Don't dwell, she admonished herself. She couldn't go back and fix the past, even if she wanted to. With kids to take care of and a world to rebuild, it was foolish to spend energy on angst.
Pushing aside her worries over her adoptive daughter, Betty refocused on the matter at hand, and just in time too. Pointing, Olga declared, "there... up the valley. There's a set of ruins... I think it's a Soviet base..."
Nodding, Betty opined, "that's the right era. Dead Hand was originally built during the Soviet period."
Taking a breath, the rusalka declared, "there's a remnant of a road. It looks like it was intended to be hidden, even back then." "The Politburo wouldn't have wanted their death-machine to be found," Talia chuckled. "I think this is the right place."
Putting on a worried look, Nadia asked, "so what do we do?" Mock punching her in the arm, Talia chuckled, "I promise I won't make you plug into the death machine, R2."
Glaring at her, the cyborg woman amended, "we have limited resources. Provided the door's are not too overbuilt, I can get us inside. However, this valley may be crawling with dangerous fauna."
"We didn't come all this way to stare up the valley at it," Katsumi declared, as she jumped down from the rock. "If there're monsters, we smash them." Turning to Talia, she said, "what skills do you have?"
"I wasn't really good with offensive things," the rusalka responded. "It wasn't allowed in the tribe." "I can handle offense," Betty interrupted. With a nod, Talia remarked, "I can sense mutants. They're very much like Yuri's pets. They reek of death. There's likely little else to fear here." "Right," said Kat. "Let's go."
Leaving the cyborgs in charge of the camp, the group headed up the valley. The exertion warmed Betty, and she found herself thankful for Maja's ironic gift. She'd have been using magic in the not-too-distant past to overcome her fatigue. A part of her couldn't help but think of how well Finn had been managing growing old.
"Wool-gathering," Talia muttered. Nodding, she said, "there's one up ahead." "Goo-bro," Betty burbled. Conjuring a bolt of flame, she blasted the thing out of existence.
Wearing a frown of utter bafflement, Katsumi responded, "goo-bro?" "It's what Finn calls them," Betty chuckled. "They're... aaah... mushy..." "They're irradiated," Nadia muttered. "I don't even know how they're hanging together in one piece..."
Moments later, the little group encountered another such creature. "Mine," Katsumi declared. Whispering words of power, she caused a white mist to surge out of the earth around the monstrous mutant. When the mist had cleared, their foe had been turned to stone.
Hour by hour, they made their way up the valley, with the witch and the wizard variously blasting goo-bros or turning them into habitats for small birds. In the end, even Talia got in on the act, drawing an ancient pistol and blasting one of their assailants with a bolt of incandescent flame.
With each dead mutant, Nadia withdrew further and further until she was all but staring straight ahead. Betty would almost have said her eyes were glazed, if they had been organic eyes instead of electronic.
Seeing the way her neighbor and frenemy reacted was laugh-out-loud funny to Baba Yaga. Resting a hand on Nadia Ivanova's shoulder, the rusalka said, "you get used to it after a while..." Slapping her hand away, the tall cyborg cussed Talia to hell.
As the sun was nearing zenith, the little group arrived at last at the beginning of the hidden road. They'd been traveling among artifacts of the long gone Russian civilization for hours, giving Betty hope that they were in the right place. Now, they found themselves looking at the surest sign that Dead Hand was nearby.
"Bunkers," Katsumi muttered. Glancing around her, she added, "guard posts. This looks like the kind of place that gets you shot just for strolling past." "Bring back memories," Talia murmured?
Shaking her head, the Nine-Tailed-Fox responded, "I told you, Talia. The US wasn't like that. When I lost my ID card, the Security Police put me in the back of their car and dropped me off at my parents' place. You had to work to get into trouble at Minot."
Shaking off the mood, Katsumi declared, "this is where things get really dangerous."
Turning to face the group, the tall witch explained, "there's a distinct possibility that there were landmines scattered in the woods on either side of the road."
In response to Talia's quirked eyebrow, the Nine-Tailed-Fox explained, "my brother's best friend... I dated him, remember..." "Ew," howled Betty! "Don't fuck around with family friends!"
"It wasn't my best moment," Kat muttered, "but that's not important. Chuck used to say that landmines were an important part of any serious defense. While there's a good chance they've rotted away, there's a possibility that there's some still buried here. I don't want to think about how unstable thousand-year-old explosives are. And all of that's coming on top of the goo-bros."
The tall witch took lead as the six women went up the long, tree-covered lane. Everyone was on edge now, scanning the trees on either side of the road. The battered and broken concrete they walked on told that this lane was indeed man-made.
Up, up, up, went the road, as it wound through the darkened space between the trees. The space would've been peaceful and calming if not for their reason for coming here.
"This must've been very heavy concrete," Betty opined. When Talia glanced at her, she said, "a thousand years of neglect in a space even more harsh than Yakutsk, Talia. For this to still be here, it must've been a very thick road, with a great deal of reinforcing steel. This is good news. Something important's here."
"I'll be happy when we find what it is, rather than being told it'll be good," muttered Olga. Betty gave her a smirk for answer.
Break over, the little group pressed ahead, weaving their way through the forest and dealing with the occasional mutant. Finally, as the sun was heading for the horizon, they reached the side of the mountain.
"Yeah," Betty declared, "if I were to pick a place where I though I'd find something called 'Dead Hand', this is what I would choose." Olga whistled, "da. Color me impressed."
The structure was at least fifty feet high and made of concrete so heavy that it had withstood ten centuries of neglect. A patina of greenish mold and red rust covered the battered surface left by a thousand years of snow, cold, and rain. And then there were the doors.
It reminded Betty of the pictures of Cheyenne mountain in its heyday, when America's nuclear response would've been controlled from deep under the Colorado Rockies. It was clear from looking at the place that the doors were just as insanely overbuilt as the rest of the bunker.
Glancing at Nadia, Betty chuckled, "I hope you've got a really good idea..." "Da," said Nadia. "Now that we know where it is, I'll have my companions bring up the laser and burn through it. Should take us maybe a day."
"I guess violence is ok against a door," chuckled Kvazdia. Those words earned her a glare of utter rage. And then, like a ripple on a pond, the cyborg woman was calm again—at least outwardly. Coolly, she said, "we should make camp. I'll start setting up the anti-mutant defenses."
Nadia turned and stalked off, her posture suggesting she was still greatly offended. "Shit-disturber," Talia teased, as she pat Kvazdia on the shoulder.
Baba Yaga announced that she was going to go look around and slipped off into the woods. "Be careful where you step," Katsumi admonished her. Waving dismissively, Talia responded, "da, da..."
Circling around through the woods, the witch came creeping up on her neighbor and frenemy to find the mashina devushka muttering curses as she began setting up the equipment she'd brought. In spite of all her efforts at cool logic, Nadia Ivanova was still Russian in her heart.
As Talia approached, the tall cyborg's face whipped around, those uncanny eyes locking on Talia, in spite of her precautions. "Who's there," Nadia demanded?
"It's just me," Talia responded, as she stepped out of the woods. "You're not supposed to step off the trail," Nadia muttered. "Kat's paranoid," Talia chuckled. "She's Japanese, not Russian. If any of those land-mines got laid, I doubt they had a spec of explosive in them. Her people were much too polite to steal."
The cyborg princess's face went red hot, suggesting she'd scored a hit there. Talia couldn't help thinking that they hadn't found the 'thief' part of the human brain yet to replace it with machinery.
"What did you want," Nadia demanded? Yup, thought Baba Yaga. Pissed off.
Blowing out a breath, Talia murmured, "Nadia... Nadia, look at me..." The curvy cyborg glanced up, her expression miserable. "It pleases me to see my people advance themselves," Talia declared. "I'm so happy to see the world I dreamed of, when I was young, coming to be."
"There's a 'but' there," Nadia muttered. Taking her hand, Talia murmured, "it's said that Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, told his disciples to sell their coats and buy swords. The man who so often turned the other cheek urged his people to defend their lives, Nadia Ivanova. If you're slaughtered out of hand by an itinerant monster, your pretty ideals die with you..."
Striding forward, Talia took a chance and hugged her strange neighbor. In short order, the tall woman was melting down, crying all over her. "If the sinners kill all the saints, then the world only has sinners," Talia murmured. "What becomes of the people, then?"
Stepping back, Baba Yaga said, "I'm not here to pressure you. I just want you to think about things while you have a moment to do the thinking." After a moment, Nadia nodded.
Taken with a notion, Talia asked, "can that thing work when moving?" "The antenna is only bi-directional," Nadia replied. "You need repeaters to get three-sixty coverage." "Save that for tomorrow," Talia admonished her. "I can keep the monsters away for tonight."
As the explorers settled in for the evening, back in the Candy Kingdom, the Agent Princess barged into Finn's office to find him closeted with Princess Bubblegum. "You can't go in," snapped Breakfast! "What," chuckled Orzsebet? "Are they making out?"
Closing the door on the irritating breakfast person, the Lady of Spies sauntered up to the King's desk and sat hreself, ignoring the hostile looks from the Candy Monarch. "Hey, babe," Finn greeted her. "Not the best timing..."
Pushing past that, Orzsebet declared, "new information." Finn sat up straighter. Crossing her legs artfully, the Lady of Spies remarked, "we have indications that Insight has tried gaining entry to the launching facility over a dozen times within the last year."
Bonnie snorted, "Nadia's forcefield biz keeps anything bigger than a gnat out of the rocket-base. There's no value in worrying over it. It's locked up tight."
"It's not the success or failure that's important," Orzsebet replied. "It's the timing." She had the King's full attention now. Crossing and uncrossing her legs, the slinky spy girl said, "five times in the early part of the year, then maybe one or two, and now six in rapid succession..."
"They're probing," Finn mused. "They're up to something." Bonnie's face became abstracted. "I don't know of any way to get through a Grid-Face Person forcefield without a lot of firepower," she remarked. "Darren the Sleeper was able to get through one, but almost all of the monsters are gone, and we have people keeping surveillance on the Fire Bleeder."
"It's not going to be something so melodramatic," Orzsebet chuckled. "That isn't our style to go and smash the place like that. They want something. I just don't know what it is."
"What would you do, if you wanted to capture the base intact," Finn asked? With a shrug, Orzsebet replied, "I'd probe for weak spots first. When I'd found one, I'd build a plan for making entry with a small team to enable the effort..."
Alarmed, Bonnie asked, "could they already have people inside?!" "Unlikely," Orzsebet responded. "My agents on the ground are monitoring the facility daily. No, they would want to do the infiltration as close to the day that they're going to attack."
"So, we have time," Finn murmured. "We need to figure out how they think they're going to get in." Glancing at his evil girlfriend, the big man asked, "I know they have cash, but do they have access to gadgets? Or magic, maybe?"
"All of the above," Orzsebet replied. "Gordon took some things, when he left our headquarters. With that said, those things are considered too precious to use outside of an existential threat." "Because you'd use them up," Bonnie sighed.
Nodding, Orzsebet declared, "we typically use contractors, Your Majesty..." "Contractors," Finn murmured. Before he could snatch out his phone to look that word up, Bonnie intervened, explaining, "contractors are people who work for a short time and a fixed fee, Finn... like the men who worked on your house..."
"I did all the work on my house, Peebles," Finn retorted. "Uh, yeah," Bonnie giggled, "anyway, you're saying you hire mercenaries to do your dirty work..." "Yes," Orzsebet replied. "We should look for mercenaries who have the ability to break into secured facilities like this and round them up."
"Watch them," Finn retorted. "We're not taking people's freedom because they might be asked or hired to do something. That's not much better than what Insight does." "As you wish," Orzsebet replied.
Ended up having to rewrite this. I'm in the phase where I have to tie up all the threads, and unfortunately, I missed a couple, so I had to tear up what I was writing and restart. But I think I'm back on track.