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This message Premiere #45: Split Seconds was posted by Ticking down to apocalypse from the Hooded Hood on Wednesday, February 5, 2003 at 14:00.
Premiere #45: Split Seconds
Premiere Archive (Previous episodes)
Who's Who in the Technoverse
The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom
Who's Who in the Parodyverse
by Dancer
Reinforced plasteel walls designed to hold back a quantum packet trans-nuclear warhead screamed and buckled under mighty fists from the strongest man alive. The White Room was under siege from the last science hero, and lots of things were happening at once…
_______________
“We’re hit! We’re hit!” warned Al B Harper as the SPUD helicarrier rocked on its axis.
“Multiple hull breaches on all decks,” warned Natalia Romanza from the burning defense panel. “We have intruders.”
Just then the first of the Science Special Corps cut their way through the bulkhead to the operations deck. Colonel Daniel Drury, director of SPUD, spun around with a Technopolitan shattercannon and blew them out the way they’d entered.
“Anti-grav generators failing,” Al B. called, desperately splicing wires as the ship’s yaw increased. “We’re going down.”
Skydive of the Technopolis Aerial Combat Unit burst in and wrecked the console Al was wrestling with beyond all hope of repair. “Nah. You’re going up,” he promised. “I mean in a boom-type way,” he added, in case people hadn’t understood his cool threat.
“It’s not funny if you have to explain it,” Falcon warned him, hammering into him, wings still blazing from the firefight he’s just survived. Skydive was smashed into the already-broken wall of video monitors and lay there in the smoking ruin jerking as lightning arced across his gravity harness. “Now that’s comedy,” Falc proclaimed.
The helicarrier lurched to starboard. “Power at 20% and dropping,” Natalia warned. “Comms are down. We’ve lost touch with Mumphrey and with Parodiopolis.”
“General evacuation,” snarled Drury. “Get folks out while they kin get!”
“No time!” Al B warned. And suddenly the helicarrier started to drop like a stone.
Nats caught it. Seared and tattered, the telekinetic levitated above the pile of Technopolitan ground troops that had thought a downed Aunt Sally was easy prey, pointed his dark wooden staff at the city-block sized helicarrier, and screamed as he took its weight and kept it from free fall.
The carrier landed heavily on its side. Nats toppled through the air, a third of his body-weight burned away by his efforts. Falcon rocket out and caught him before he was broken on the machinery-littered battlefield.
Then they were hemmed in by the next wave of combat drones and vanished in a glare of laser shots.
_______________
“This isn’t going well,” ManMan noted as he took down his seventh droid tank with nothing more than a talkative knife. “Could be time for a tactical withdrawal. To Hawaii."
“It’s certainly not looking good for our side,” Knifey noted as the advanced Technopolitan fleet gained air superiority over the increasingly scattered Earth defense forces. “We knew this was only a diversion to keep the enemy occupied while the Lair Legion finish things inside the defense screen, but we’re one step off a massacre here.”
“I’m not going anywhere yet,” Chronic snarled, unleashing another riff from his demonic guitar to liquefy the next disintegrator remote formation that swooped on their position. “These bastards put a wire in my head, and I haven’t had time for payback yet.”
Hacker Nine crawled out from the partial cover of Aunt Sally’s chassis. “In that case, can you bring down that silver vessel with the big transmitter globes hanging from it?” he asked. “Cause if so, I can give you your shot.”
“Knifey?” ManMan asked speculatively.
“Yeah. Do it,” the blade answered, so Joe Pepper wound back his arm and flung the weapon in a deadly, impossible arc right at the main intake vent of the floating tactical platform’s main grav grid.
The vessel jerked and tried to compensate, but just then a burning orange bolt rose from the ground and sheared off one wing. The platform slid to the earth with a shriek of ruptured metal. “What’s that?” Chronic demanded.
“Who cares?” Manman said. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mou…” He fell silent because he found himself facing a winged horse with a woman’s torso rising wrathfully above the fallen craft. “Er, I mean… forget it,” he answered.
Then the creature toppled gracefully to the floor. Only then did Joe and Chronic realize she was ribboned with blood, barely breathing.
“Deal with her,” Hacker Nine urged ManMan. “Chronic, this way. I want to hook your guitar up to the Science Police comm system and see what happens.”
A slow, evil grin blossomed on Chronic’s face.
ManMan tried to make the broken Pegasus comfortable. “What happened?” he asked, appalled at her wounds.
“I won,” she answered in a bubbling whisper. “Tell the Constellation I did my job… It doesn’t matter what happens here today… The Dimensional Generators are sabotaged. If they try… try to use them again it’ll rip them apart, not reality… They can never go back, never shred timespace again… I did it…”
Pegasus had doomed Technopolis and all its people to exile or death.
_______________
“The evacuation alarm!” Lisette recognized in the buckled bowels of the SPUD carrier. “We’re going down. We have to get out of here!”
Windblossom gestured to the countless wounded piled by the walls and in the corridors of the medical bay. “And leave these people here?”
“We go down with the ship,” Valeria agreed. “Whatever happens.”
There was a shriek of tortured metal as the science villains invaded the medical deck.
_______________
“What’s happening?” Mumphrey asked hazily as Asil helped him stagger towards a chair.
“You got them there,” the Lisa-clone assured him. “Your temporal powers just lasted long enough. But we’ve lost contact with the Legion inside the Technopolis force wall.”
“The mission parameters called for the strike force to have taken that barrier down by now,” Herbert P. Garrick worried. “Every minute it stays up we’re taking massive casualties. Soon we won’t be able to continue prosecuting the assault.”
“We’re getting reports from the other theaters of war,” Asil told Sir Mumphrey. “The New Battlers are down, and the Abandoned Legion is cornered. We don’t know yet about the JBH. None of them expected to have to keep fighting for this long before our task force in Technopolis took down the Red Watchman.”
“That Premiere chap?” Mumph wondered.
“No sign.” Garrick swallowed hard. “I think we might have failed.”
_______________
“It hurts!” screamed Mad Wendy. The planetary-class reality-bender was currently holding back nuclear attack on Parodiopolis and Gothametropolis from the main strength of the Technopolis combined forces. Ninety million lives depended on her maintaining a fantasy world around them to keep out the harsh reality of radioactive genocide. And she was running out of strength.
“Who cares if it hurts?” demanded the inconceivable Yurt, pulping another battle tank and using it as a missile to down one of the heavy grav platforms that hovered above. “If puny men hurt, smash them! If they fight, smash them. If they run and bleed, smash them! Smash! Smash! Smash!”
“They don’t belong here,” Space Ghost worried, dividing his time between keeping the invading air force in disarray by the judicious use of his Spank Ray and a series of Gah! force attacks on the advancing metahuman ground troops. “You can’t just exchange masses of that magnitude between dimensions with different reality quotients and expect no consequences. That technology should never have been used.” The most frightening thing about Space Ghost today was this: he was totally sober.
“But it was,” Xander the Improbable noted. “And once this chain of consequences was forged it all had to come down to one, critical moment.”
Mad Wendy shrieked one last time and toppled over. Her illusions went with her. Suddenly the cities she had masked became clearly visible.
“Crap,” breathed Space Ghost. Suddenly, it was as if a switch was flicked inside his head. “All hands to battle stations! Warp factor nine! Hand out the cheese dip and be ready to rock and roll! Sorry about this, Yurt. Spaaaank Ray!” The kinetic beam hammered into the massive radioactive peasant hut that walked like a man and bore him on a lethal trajectory up and through the outer framework of the Technopolitan command platform. Then Space Ghost himself concentrated and fired a final blast that smashed every single flying vehicle out of the skies.
Then he was gone. Used up.
The wrathful downed soldier and chip-possessed science heroes swarmed from their vehicles and formed up on the spot where Xander stood over Mad Wendy. Armed metahumans prepared to deal harshly with the last defender standing. “Not now,” the master of the mystic crafts told them dismissively. “Important things are happening. It’s the critical moment.”
_______________
And on the other side of the continent reinforced plasteel walls buckled aside, and Premiere and the Red Watchman faced each other at last.
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