Amir’s energy weapon aims itself squarely at Alycia’s head.
“Hey. We talked about this,” Jason warns. “She’s different.”
The barrel wobbles, and lowers. “Fine. Now what?” Amir asks. Jason and Alycia both take a breath.
The trio heard the activity of soldiers, and assumed it was for them. But now there’s gunshots - distant ones. “We go help whoever’s here,” Alycia declares. “Amir, where’s the armory you got that from?”
“I didn’t,” he answers. “There were guards at my cell.”
“Oh. Well done. Come on.” Alycia leads the way, picking out directions by ear, following the familiar sound of violence.
Nono has come down from her vengeful fury, and she emerges from John’s armored exterior near the console where Emma is laying. Before she can say a word, Emma holds up a hand. “Healing factor. Just need time.” Her words are stilted, and her throat rattles from pained breathing. But it’s good enough for Nono to release a long sigh of relief.
John, meanwhile, prompts Alex. “What’s this about EMP bombs?”
Alex points over at one of the weapon storage areas. “A bunch of them, laying there. Pretty sure they’ll lay out any nanobot in the place. Thing is, we gotta place em effectively.”
“Leave that to me,” John vows. And as the Phoenix crashes through several plastic platforms in succession and lands just above them, he grins. “Leave that to us.”
The human soldiers are withdrawing, including recovering their own wounded or unconscious. “Nice of Pyrrhus to include that in their programming,” muses Alex.
Unfortunately, the spider-bots are now swarming from other parts of the underground citadel, and the team can see them converging on the team’s position. Alex shakes their head. “I take it back, fuck Pyrrhus.”
The tempo of gunfire is changing. Alycia, Jason, and Amir climb staircase after staircase, using rapid strikes and surprise to disable the soldiers they find along the way. And then a black shadow swoops overhead.
“That’s a Phoenix!” Jason cries.
“That’s my team!” Alycia realizes.
“They’re gonna die,” Amir points out, gesturing up at the lines of swarming spiders descending in lines along the plastic webbing of the city.
“No. They won’t.” Alycia, still running, clenches her fists. “I will not allow Pyrrhus to hurt anyone else. And I think I know how.”
John is halfway done loading up the EMP bombs onto Loosie Goosey when Jason, Alycia, and Amir arrive. Amir has been a crack shot with his weapon, taking down a few of the spiders, but it’s clear that there’s too many to deal with via small arms. The team is going to have to move quickly.
“Hey, Otto said Summer sent something for ya!” calls John, upon seeing Alycia. He pats the Phoenix and points, and obligingly the bird-bot unloads its cargo.
Alycia’s eyes widen. It’s her Vyortovian hover-cycle, but there’s more than that. As she approaches, she finds something unexpected.
“Packie…” She picks up the fuzzy Al-Pack-A backpack and hugs it, not caring who sees. Finding it surprisingly lumpy, she opens it up. Summer has packed a handful of MREs with smiling suns hand-drawn on the packaging, all of Alycia’s spare grenades, and a spare set of her shock gloves.
She turns to the team. “I know what Pyrrhus wants. Jason and I need to go confront him - distract him - to let you set those bombs. The EMP from Cairo, I assume.”
She turns, then, to Amir. “I want you to lead this team right now. Get them out of here safely. More than anything else, keep them safe.”
Amir’s eyes stay narrowed. “I still don’t know that I can trust you, Alycia Chin.”
She smiles back at him. “But I know that I can trust you, Amir Quill. I trust you with their lives. And mine.”
Amir shrugs, but doesn’t push back. Instead he takes stock, first checking on Emma, then Nono. “Okay, you four. It’s go time. Saddle up on the bird. You - need a carry?”
Emma scowls, and rises to her feet. Her almost-fall is halted by Nono on one side and Amir on the other. “Yeah, you’re fine,” Amir grins, reading Emma’s pride from her scowling face. “Names and powers, you first…”
As he takes charge, Alycia beckons for Jason to hop aboard the hovercycle. She slips on her alpaca backpack, slides on the shock gloves, revs the engine, and takes off.
“You think you’re in charge now,” Pyrrhus says, over the bike’s comm system.
Alycia vaults the hovercycle off some of the webbing, crashing through a handful of approaching spiders. Behind her, Jason is pulling grenades out of the pack and tossing them with expert precision.
“It had occurred to me,” Alycia answers. “We’re out of your cells and blowing up your base.”
“Bases can be rebuilt,” Pyrrhus counters.
“But we can’t. That’s why your spiders aren’t shooting at us.”
“True. Say, have you figured it out? Tell you what. Let’s trade master plans. You tell me what you’ve deduced. I tell you the parts you couldn’t possibly know about. It’ll be a fun way to pass the time.”
Alycia laughs at that. “Sure. I think you genuinely wanted to kill Jason and I at first. But that changed, after the Atlantean exchange. You saw an opportunity. Because the one thing the nanobots have taken away is the one thing they can’t give back. The capacity for hypergenius.”
“You could say I was of four minds about what to do,” laughs Pyrrhus. “But yes, you are correct. Keep going!”
“That’s why Sidorov is working for you,” Jason adds. “You needed that hypergenius, and he was someone you could control, even now.”
“But he wasn’t good enough for what you really wanted. You could push your connectome back into a human body, but doing so would destroy that person, and the mutation you need,” Alycia says.
“And you could clone someone, or create a new host body, but that still takes months, like the ANTIBODY program in Russia,” Jason says. “Maybe you’ve got clones of both of us growing somewhere in tanks, but it’s not happening fast enough for your plans.”
“True, true, I do,” Pyrrhus answers. “Good luck handling that!”
Alycia banks the hoverbike left, plowing through spiderbots in a flurry of sparks. Without a clear idea, she’s heading for the center of the web, reasoning she’ll find something important there. “So you keep us alive, because we might be compatible hosts. You’re made partly of our minds, so stuffing your connectome into our skulls might just work.”
Pyrrhus cheers. “Fantastic!”
“But you haven’t,” she adds with a smirk. “You had us at your mercy. But you didn’t just wipe us out. Why not? I think it’s because Jason and Alycia are part of you too, and they won’t allow it. I think the copies of us inside you are fighting you. They’re making you vulnerable. And that’s why we’re going to win.”
“All entirely on the nose,” Pyrrhus concedes. “Except the last part, because I have a trump card. Now, my turn. I realized more than your individual usefulness to me. I realized through memories of the Menagerie what I really had available to me. A boy who could synthesize minds to order. Minds with real emotions, real souls. Another boy, empowered by cosmic forces that will attract themselves to anyone with sufficiently strong virtues - which can arise from a machine. Genetic and magical lineages of power, encased in artificial bodies. A mélange of Quill and Chin isn’t enough. I can build an army of ultimate super-men, starting with the two of you.”
“We won’t let that happen,” Alycia scowls.
Pyrrhus’ voice turns alarmingly casual. “Say, Jason… Why not tell Alycia how you got out of the cells?”
Alycia glances over her shoulder at Jason, who’s smiling sadly. “Cards on table, I suppose.”
“What does he mean?” she asks, suddenly uncertain.
“I was lured to Cairo by a Mirror Alycia. I disabled her, at the cost of control over my nanobots, but somehow her consciousness got wedged in my head. So I’ve been carrying around an electronic copy of her - of you.”
Alycia’s temper flares. “Something like that would have been nice to know about before!”
“She thought I was going to delete her,” Jason explains sheepishly. “I said… I couldn’t do that.”
“Well I can!”
Pyrrhus laughs across the radio. “A delightful domestic dispute. What do you think, Alycia? Is your partner already compromised? Is your mission to eliminate me going to cost you Jason Quill as collateral damage?”
Alycia scowls, and revs the hovercycle until she can’t hear anything else.