Emperor Mollusk Versus the Sinister Brain (19 page)

We arrived in Paris in under twenty minutes. That was still more than enough time for the Brain’s ships to have surrounded the tower. Three heavy towcraft employed tractor beams in an effort to uproot the monument.

I took aim and blasted one of the craft. It floundered, struggling to maintain its equilibrium.

The towcraft spit out several dozen fighters. They came roaring toward me. I blasted them out of the sky while engaging in evasive maneuvers.

The Brain appeared on the transmission screen. “Emperor, where do you come from?”

“Didn’t see this coming?” I asked. “Even with your anti-time radio?”

My craft zipped low over the city. I fired off a volley of rockets. Pursuing fighters exploded.

“I don’t need absolute knowledge of the future to defeat you,” said the Brain. “You’re only one saucer against fifty fighters.”

I came to a sudden stop, and the fighters flew past. They buzzed like a school of hungry piranhas. Beams burned against our shielding. Zala eyed the rapidly draining power levels.

The Brain cackled. “Surrender, and I just might let you live.”

The saucer sounded the warning klaxon.

“Shields at thirteen percent,” added Zala unnecessarily.

I hovered while the fighters continued their barrage.

“If you have one of your superweapons,” she said, “you should use it now.”

A backup squad of my own robotic fighters zoomed over the City of Lights. They shot a few of the Brain’s ships out of the air. The struggle broke into pitched aerial battles as our forces waged war.

“You don’t give up easily,” said the Brain. “I can respect that about—”

I hit the comm mute.

While our fleets kept each other busy, I blew a towcraft in two. Its flaming wreckage came crashing down. The other two craft struggled with their cargo beams.

I opened communications. “You aren’t getting the tower.”

“I’ll admit I didn’t know you’d interfere,” said the Brain, “but that doesn’t mean I didn’t come prepared.”

Something tore its way out of the broken mass of metal of the towcraft I’d shot down. A six-story automaton stepped from the debris, none the worse for the crash. It was a standard Martian combot design. Four legs and four arms mounted on a cylindrical body. There were a few cannons mounted on it, but it was mostly designed to inflict terror on the enemy by stomping its way through their ranks. At the top of the cylinder, a clear dome showcased a huge Terra Sapien brain that glowed a bright emerald.

“Tremble at my most fearsome weapon.” The Brain on my screen howled with laughter. “The radioactive mind of Madame Curie!”

Shrieking, the Curie bot smashed nearby buildings with her flailing limbs.

“You can stop me from capturing the Eiffel Tower. Or you can save Paris from her rampage. But even you can’t do both.”

The Brain’s image faded from the screen.

I hesitated.

“You can’t be debating this,” said Zala. “If he gets that tower…I don’t know what will happen. But it can’t be good.”

Fires burned as fighter craft crashed around me. Paris had always been my favorite Terran city. But I couldn’t live here anymore. Whenever I looked across the City of Lights, I remembered the day necessity had forced me to destroy half of it. I’d rebuilt it, but now, seeing pockets of it ablaze with damage and Madame Curie demolishing it beneath her terrible claws, I discovered that I couldn’t let it happen again.

I ordered my squadrons to focus their attack on the robot. They broke off and strafed Curie without effect. Her brain radiated a sharp green flare. The superior shielding on my saucer was able to protect us from her disruptive pulse. My fighters weren’t so fortunate. Most dropped from the sky. Several zipped around in random flight patterns until colliding with each other or the ground. One or two outright exploded.

Curie demolished a city block in three stomps.

I zipped toward her and shot her with the full assortment of blasters and death rays on my craft. They had no effect. The mutated brain powering and guiding the combot was some kind of energy sponge. Every blast I threw at her was absorbed and channeled back into her.

“They’re escaping with the tower,” said Zala.

“I’ll deal with that later.”

I launched an assortment of ballistic weaponry, ranging from missiles and rockets to explosive neutrino spheres. They met with limited success. Most exploded at a distance from Curie when they were disrupted by interference generated by her. Others veered off target, exploding around the city.

An alien force seized control of the saucer. Curie wasn’t only giant and radioactive. She was also telekinetic.

My attempts to counter proved pointless after she drained the saucer’s power. The engines went dead. As did my exoskeleton. Snarg gurgled as her cybernetic parts shut down. She could function without them, but it did take the zip out of her step.

Curie pulled us into her arms and clamped her claws into the hull.

“Do something, Emperor,” said Zala.

“I’m open to suggestions.”

“Reverse polarity or reconfigure something. I don’t know. Do some of that scientific magic you’re so adept at.”

What I said then must have shocked her. It certainly shocked me.

“I’m out of ideas.”

With a triumphant howl, Curie hurled us away like a Frisbee. We sailed helplessly, bounced around without the inertial dampeners, skipped across the street twice, before grinding to a crashing stop.

There wasn’t enough power left for even the emergency lights to work.

I sat in the darkened cockpit, in my own nonfunctional exoskeleton. It couldn’t have been long. A few minutes at most. But in the black quiet of the cockpit, I sat and thought about nothing.

“Emperor?” Two pinpoints of light, Zala’s eyes, appeared in the dark. “Emperor, are you alive?”

“I’m alive,” I said. “But I can’t move.”

“Hold on.” She grunted and groaned as she dealt with her own problems. “Your pet rolled over on me. I’m almost free.”

Snarg gurgled.

“Don’t get mad at me, you stupid bug.” Something clanged against something else. “There!”

Another light illuminated the darkness. Zala had a small flashlight. It wasn’t very bright, but a hungry sea slug takes what it can get. The cockpit was steeply tilted. Zala managed to climb her way toward me.

“Are you hurt?” she asked.

She shone the light on my dome. I’d unplugged myself from the exo, and it was now little more than an unwieldy aquarium.

“I’m not dead, but I’m unwilling to commit to anything more at the moment. Are you?”

“I’ll live.”

Her face was cut and bruised, and it obviously pained her to move. As could be expected. Neptunon physiology, aside from our highly developed brains, was relatively simple and difficult to traumatize.

I didn’t comment on her pain. It would have only insulted her.

“We need to get you out of here. You’ll have to let me carry you.” She ran her fingers along the cracked dome. “Is there an emergency release on this thing? Or do I have to break it open?”

“Perhaps we should wait for help,” I said.

“We can’t stay in this saucer, helpless and exposed.”

She was right, but outside of my exo, I was just a squishy genius exposed to a dangerous world. And Zala was one of my worst enemies.

“Damn it, Emperor. You’re just going to have to trust me.”

“I’ve never been very good at trusting,” I admitted.

“Maybe this would be a good time to start. Do you feel that?”

Few sounds penetrated the cockpit, but a slight shudder ran through it. One right after another. Each tremor stronger than the last. The advancing footsteps of Madame Curie.

I pushed the release. The dome popped open, spilling water and nearly causing Zala to slip. She reached down, and I wrapped my tentacles around her arm.

“My gods, Emperor. You are slimy.”

“I like to maintain a healthy mucous sheen.”

I secured myself to her arm. But not before I opened the exo compartment and removed the mystery component.

She grunted. “Not so tight, Emperor.”

“Sorry.” I pointed toward a lever. “That’s the emergency exit.”

The tremors intensified. She pulled the lever. A section of cockpit wall fell away, and she jumped out as Snarg dragged herself behind us. We cleared the wreck just as Curie wrapped her metallic hands around it. She lifted it off the ground, studying it like a broken toy.

Curie discarded the saucer, tossing it aside. The combot cast a bright red spotlight on Zala and me.

Zala turned to run, but Curie slammed a leg in our way. The giant robot bent closer. Her monstrous green brain flickered with atomic energy. Loyal Snarg, though barely able to raise her head, growled.

I held the device in my tentacles. It was useless. I might as well have been holding a hunk of scrap metal.

The shadow of the towcraft rolled overhead. Curie trundled away, and the craft tractored her into it. And then the two towcraft and their remaining fighters flew away, along with the tower. The air shimmered as they vanished behind a stealth field, disappearing in their triumph without even bothering to crush me underfoot.

And there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to stop it.

My saucer was unsalvageable, but it was a simple matter to bring in a new one. I had hundreds stationed across Terra for my needs. And thousands of spare exos. Snarg was fine once her batteries were recharged. And Zala’s injuries were easily treatable with a bit of modern medicine.

A nurse applied a bandage to the cut on Zala’s forehead. “The patch should seal the cut. You might have a scar.”

Zala was too proud to show weakness. She acknowledged the doctor with a grunt.

“Thank you, Doctor,” I said. “That will be all.”

“Yes, Lord Mollusk. Just press the button if you need anything else.” The doctor left the room.

I stood at the eighth-floor window. My view of Paris was obstructed, but I could see the fires still burning. Sirens filled the night as the Terrans fought the blazes. The damage wasn’t catastrophic. Certainly nowhere near as devastating as the beginnings of the Saturnite invasion. Paris would survive.

But the flames hypnotized me, and though the view was facing the wrong way, I didn’t have to see the empty space where the Eiffel Tower should have been to be reminded it was missing.

“What’s wrong with you, Emperor?” asked Zala.

Snarg, sensing my melancholy, skittered submissively at my feet.

I stroked her between her antennae.

“He beat me.”

“It wasn’t your finest hour, but I’m sure you’ll get over it.”

“You don’t understand. He won. I lost.”

“Oh, I understand. I was there.” She stood, tested her arm. It was still tender. “And, yes, you were defeated. Handily.”

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

She beamed. I’d never seen her so happy.

I turned to her. “I’ve never been beat before.”

With a dry chuckle, she jumped off the table. “Then answer me this. Why aren’t you Warlord of Venus?”

“I’ve failed before. Many times before. That’s what comes from taking risks. Even I can’t control all the variables.”

“It’s always a pleasure to hear you admit that,” she said. “You should do it more often. So if you know you’re fallible then why should you be bothered by this particular defeat? Humiliating as it might have been.”

“You’re really enjoying this.”

She tried to wipe the smile off her face, but the best she could do was to lessen it.

“This is different,” I said. “This feels…different.”

“Different,” she said. “A bit vague, isn’t that?”

“The Brain has the anti-time transmission.”

Zala drew her scimitar and practiced a few swings to see how her arm responded. “He had that before. It didn’t seem to bother you before.”

“That’s because I assumed I was smarter than him.”

“Are you saying you’re not so certain now?”

I didn’t answer, and she lowered her weapon.

“Emperor, are you telling me you think he might be smarter than you?”

“I don’t know,” I said softly.

“This can’t be the first time you’ve considered the possibility there might be someone capable of outwitting you. There are billions of intelligent life-forms in the system. I’m no scientist, but I would think it would seem statistically unlikely you could be smarter than all of them all the time.”

I stroked Snarg’s antennae. “I’m aware of that. Intellectually.”

“But now you have indisputable proof. For the first time in your life, you have to admit that someone was smarter than you. No way to deny it, is there?”

I didn’t answer, which was an answer in itself.

“I thought you were made of sterner stuff, Emperor.”

She pushed the smile from her face and joined me at the window.

“You were beaten. Humiliated. Your defeat was devastating and total. You failed on every level.” She stifled a smirk as she smoothed her feathers. “It happens.”

“Not to me.”

She shook her head. “It happens to everyone. So for once, just this once, you were not in charge of your destiny. You weren’t the one making the decisions. You overconfidently blundered into a fight you couldn’t win and learned a hard lesson. No matter how gifted you are, no matter how smart and powerful and capable, you’re going to lose sometimes. You can’t win every battle. Even you, brilliant as you are”—I appreciated that she refrained from using any sarcasm in the word
brilliant
—“will make mistakes. And, yes, this was a big one.

“But you’re still alive. You’re still a genius who can build a doomsday device out of wool, coconuts, and cardboard. So maybe the Brain is smarter than you. So what? So what if he handed you a crushing defeat. And I think we can both admit it was crushing.”

“You’re really enjoying this.”

“It was almost worth getting killed to watch,” she admitted. “Almost.”

She said, “Do you want to know why I laughed at the cave, Emperor?” She clasped me on the shoulder and smiled, without malice. With perhaps a smidgeon of genuine affection.

“You might be an egotistical, megalomaniacal, manipulative criminal. But you don’t back down from a challenge. Even against a foe who might very well be ahead of you every step of the way, you’re still determined to see this through. You can’t walk away. Not from science. Not from mysteries. Not even from this world that you endanger just as often as you save. It’s that character flaw that has led you toward every mistake you’ve ever made. But I realized then that it’s also about the only thing I like about you.

“You failed, Emperor, walking into a trap created by your own hubris. And maybe that overconfidence was warranted, but your devastating defeat was bound to happen sooner or later. If not this time, then the next. Or the next after that. But if there was one life-form in this universe I never expected to lose confidence in himself, it would be you. And if you just hand that defeat to the Brain, then you’re not the Neptunon I thought you were.

“Nobody is quite as smart as they think they are. Not even you.”

Zala left me to my thoughts. As she exited the room, she chuckled to herself.

“Devastating,” she muttered with a chortle.