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This message Premiere #23: No Exit was posted by on Saturday, August 24, 2002 at 05:32.
Premiere #23: No Exit
Premiere Archive (Previous episodes)
Who's Who in the Technoverse
The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom
Who's Who in the Parodyverse
The stolen Technopolitan Grav Car coasted in low over the sea towards the column of oily smoke. “I’m reading a thermal signature consistent with multiple fires,” worried Xanadelle, the supposedly-dead Sov-Blok agent who has helped Messenger, spiffy, Falcon, and dull thud escape from Technopolis. “Is this Herringcarp Asylum place meant to be in ruins?”
Messenger leaned forward and checked the viewing screens. “No. It’s meant to be safely shielded from outside attack by the Hooded Hood’s causality screens.” He scowled. “I don’t like this at all. Take is in carefully.”
“Take is in fast,” spiffy contradicted him. “If the LL’s in there then they’re trapped beneath burning rubble. Cheez! That place looks like it’s been totally trashed. We have to find the Legion.”
“Not just the Legion,” Falcon told them from his makeshift sickbed on the rear seat. “This was where we stashed the refugees, the tortured and mutilated science heroes an’ technicians that Premiere liberated. There’s damn near a thousand badly injured people interned down there – or there was.”
“It could be a trap,” warned Messenger.
“It could be a life and death situation for those people down there,” warned dull thud. “I say we go in.”
“Heroes are so damn sexy,” moued Xanadelle. “I never could resist them. Taking us down.”
___________________________________
“…had to put down an infestation if timeghosts in Kabul, but otherwise things have been remarkably orderly,” reported Starpom Omega, the principal science hero of the former Sov-Blok. He shrugged and dropped the temporal chips of the executed techno-dead marauders on the council table as Jackie Rabbit, Kid Produce, and Pigeonman entered the makeshift command center.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Jackie called to Lisa, Yo, and Cheryl as they presided over the interim world council that was somehow holding back anarchy and destruction on the Technoworld, “but the JBH is ready to leave now. We’re heading down to the Florida Badlands to try and find a working portable regenerator unit that we can port back to Earth to heal Finny and the other injured folks. Rumor has it that there’s still a thriving body parts black market down there so they must have a cellular regenerator to run their disgusting business. If so, we’ll find it.”
“Come back with all your body parts, young people,” warned Starpom Omega. “These organ-stealers use nasty bio-weapons. Take special care.”
“Don’t worry,” Pigeonman bristled. “We’re pros. We’ll get the job done.”
Visionary watched them leave with a worried look. “Should we have told them that the portal back to Herringcarp Asylum has gone down and we don’t know why?” he asked Cheryl, Lisa, and Yo. “That even if they get the regenerator there’s no way home?”
“Nuh-uh,” scowled Lisa. “If word gets out that Premiere can’t get back here it’s all going to fly apart. Everything will flare up again, worse than before. Millions will die. We’ve got to keep up the bluff.”
“Yo is thinking is important to keep going,” Yo agreed. “Will not be good if word is to be getting out.”
“Not if word gets out,” worried Cheryl. “When.”
___________________________________
spiffy hauled great chunks of debris away with his symbiotic fern as the returnees tried to pinpoint confused lifesigns beneath the wreckage that has been Herringcarp Asylum. “How far now?” he demanded.
Xanadelle checked the hand held sensor-scanner over the ruins. “About another two point two meters,” she told him. “I can’t be more precise. This whole place is riddled with pockets of contradictory information, and there’s a nasty background radiation I don’t like.”
“The Red Watchman nuked this place?” Falcon wondered, wincing at his wounds as he tried to shift his torn body to see how the others were faring. “Crap. I thought we were the ones being rescued till I saw the other guys.”
“Not nuclear attack, no,” Xanadelle puzzled. “I’m reading traces of massive shaped concussion smart explosives though, and maybe a techno-rift that the bad guys got in through. I don’t like that.”
“Cressida can’t sense anybody’s thoughts yet,” dull thud reported with a worried frown. “Maybe it’s just this place…”
“Or maybe the Watchman found a way to get to his most dangerous enemies,” glowered Messenger. “Keep digging.”
“Hey!” called Falcon. “Over there! That rubble moved!”
“I see it!” dull thud called out. “I’ll get Cressida to transmute this rubble and then…”
The blackened hand reached out from the debris and blasted the Scotsman with a hard radiation burst sufficient to vaporize a battleship. Then Thermonuclear Man rose up from the wreckage and looked around for more people to kill.
___________________________________
The service tunnels around the edge of Technopolis were swarming with science police carrying neural disruptor packages, and they pressed in on Premiere and his infiltration team with expert precision.
“Try not to kill them,” Hunter Victorious called to Cobra, ManMan, and Ziles. “They’re not in control of their actions. These are good guys controlled by Obedience Chips!”
“Of course they are,” Cobra hissed, breaking the neck of the officer that tried to pin her. “They sent these guards hoping our compassion would weaken us. Give no quarter.”
“Where’s Premiere?” shouted Ziles as she avoided a shatterlance and brushed relaxor crème over the face of her opponent. “We need to fall back. They knew we were coming. Set an ambush.”
“Of course they did,” agreed Knifey. “Ziles, do you trust me?”
“Shut up, Knifey,” ManMan warned. “Or I’ll stab myself in the eye.”
“Take Joe down now” Knifey spoke into the empathic Ziles’ mind.
Ziles ducked under the press of attackers and dropped her own teammate with a nerve-pinch. “Mind telling me what this is all about, Knifey?” she demanded uncertainly. “I just had this most confused empathic flash from Manny’s mind, total zoo time.”
“He’s had an Obedience Chip implant,” Knifey warned. “I couldn’t say anything before because he’d have harmed himself – with me! I think he assassinated the Hooded Hood.”
“Good,” snarled Cobra. “But he also led us into a trap. We can’t get out of here, especially not with one man down and our native guide missing. Where is Premiere?”
“I haven’t seen him since Count Armageddon brought the tunnels down,” worried HV, clutching at a bloody arm but fighting on. “We have to make our own way out of here.”
Then the science police sent in the sonic minebots.
___________________________________
“Thermonuclear Man!” breathed Xanadelle. “Crap! I don’t suppose any of you has some devastating secret power that you want to suddenly reveal to take this bastard down?”
“I can bleed a bit harder,” suggested Falcon. The Sov-Blok agent had dragged the tortured SPUD operative from the grav-flyer just before Thermonuclear Man has shredded it, but Sam Wilson was in no condition to fight even if his flight harness hadn’t been shredded in Technopolis. He belonged in an intensive care ward.
“Nah,” admitted spiffy. “But I do have an energy-absorbing fern that can mop up hard radiation and pump it back where it came from – like this!”
Thermonuclear Man actually took a step backwards. “Pretty good,” he admitted. “But I feed on rad. Now I’m going to rip off your balls and make you eat them!”
“Or you could pick these razor-letters out of your face?” suggested Messenger, hurling his weapons with pinpoint accuracy to slice through the enemy’s ultra-touch hide and actually draw blood.
“Aaarrgh!” cried Thermonuclear Man, releasing a wave of lethal energy and a concussive force sufficient to hammer all his enemies fifty feet back into the smoking rubble. Spiffy absorbed the killer radiation but was toppled unconscious by the wall of force that slammed behind it. Messenger picked himself painfully from the debris favoring his broken arm and fractured ribs. He fingered a parcel bomb and wondered if he could get close enough to make Thermonuclear Man eat it.
“Now you die, slow and bloody,” the science villain promised. “Xanadelle, I’m saving you for last.”
The Sov-Blok agent couldn’t reply, sprawled as she was on the wreckage of the asylum.
Thermonuclear Man moved in for the kill.
And vanished in a golden flash.
“Got him!” gasped Goldeneyed, just before slumping to the ground with internal hemorrhaging from the strain of teleporting a significant radioactive packet away from the combat zone.
“G-Eyed,” dull thud recognized, still curled in a ball muttering to himself as he dealt with the effects of the radiation burst he had taken. His psionic parasite tapeworm had transmuted radiation to conversation and he was shuddering through a feverish monologue as he tried to shrug off the effects.
Hatman dragged himself from the small tunnel he had dug and pulled off his miner’s helmet. His t-shirt was torn and stained with blood from his chest gashes. “Yeah,” he said tiredly. “When the bombs went off Nats tried to contain them telekinetically. He saved us but he’s flat out down in the ruins of the infirmary bleeding from his ears. Then the roof came in and Finny shielded everybody with his own body. He looks like the meat grinder poster boy. AG’s down and he’s been implanted with an Obedience Chip. Donar’s holding up the rest of the basements. Premiere and the insertion team are walking into an ambush. And… they got Whitney and Dancer and Windblossom. The Red Watchman got them. I let them go.”
He staggered two paces then dropped to his knees, utterly exhausted and totally drained. “I had to choose. We saved half the people in the infirmary, but that means nearly five hundred dead. We stopped the attack but the LL’s in ribbons. And the Watchman’s still coming, Messenger. He’s still coming, and I don’t know how to stop him.”
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