Villains Don't Do Time! (Night Terror Book 6) Read online

  Villains Don’t Do Time!

  Mia Archer

  Contents

  1. Invasion

  2. First Battle of Starlight City

  3. Surprisingly Adept

  4. Betrayed

  5. Jailbird

  6. SuperMax

  7. Memory

  8. Heroes

  9. Spaced Invaders

  10. Riot

  11. Cellmates

  12. Crazy Beautiful

  13. Slop

  14. Food Fight

  15. Escape Attempt

  16. Dragged Off

  17. Back in Action

  18. Inciting Incident

  19. Prison Brawl

  20. Arena

  21. Escape

  22. Smash and Grab

  23. Back in Action

  24. Escape Plan

  25. Crowd Control

  26. Verbal Sparring

  27. Arena

  28. Psych Out

  29. Plans Coming Together

  30. Evacuation

  31. Home Again

  32. Goodbye Lab

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  Also by Mia Archer

  Villains Don’t Do Time!

  By Mia Archer

  Copyright 2018 Mia Archer

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Individuals pictured on the cover are models and used for illustrative purposes only.

  First digital edition electronically published by Mia Archer, September 2018

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  1

  Invasion

  Sirens blared through the city. It sounded for all the world like an old World War II movie depicting the Battle of Britain.

  The other sound effects echoing through the city were similar to an old battle of London movie as well. All too familiar, and yet different because this was the real world and not some foley artist's idea of what a city being bombed should sound like.

  Alien flying saucers moved over the city. Occasionally they fired projectile weapons, but more often they used laser weapons or plasma weapons or something similarly technologically advanced. They fired at any source of resistance.

  It didn't matter if that resistance was the military firing artillery rounds in a desperate attempt to stop their attack, or if that resistance came from civilians exercising their second amendment rights and damn the consequences and risk of escalating an interstellar war.

  Interstellar wrath was exactly what they got every time they were noticed by the alien invaders.

  I watched in horror as something flew up from the outskirts of Starlight City. From the looks of things it was probably a civilian firing off part of a very specialized weapon collection rather than the military. The bastard was probably having the time of his life finally having an excuse to fire off his collection.

  There was only the one shot, and it was immediately met with all the fire and fury the strange alien invaders could bring down on the poor son of a bitch.

  There were no more shots from the ground. I hoped the guy had gone to ground, but I knew it was more likely the aliens had silenced him. Forever.

  "How can you watch this happen?" I asked, pleading. I didn't like that I was pleading. I didn’t plead with people. They did the pleading and I did the indifferent listening, damn it.

  Only here I was pleading with my former girlfriend and the one person in this city who could put a stop to this.

  "I can watch it happen because it has to be done," Fialux said. "Think about all the death and destruction that's already been visited on this world. Think of all the fighting. All the crime. We're putting an end to it."

  "You know I really fucking hate it when I hear people talking like that," I said.

  Fialux blinked. "Excuse me?"

  "You heard me," I said. "I. Really. Fucking. Hate. It. When. I. Hear. People. Talking. Like. That!"

  "What do you mean?” she asked.

  "The world has never been more peaceful, statistically speaking," I said. “Whether you’re talking war or crime. So don't try to use that whole ‘world at war’ argument to justify you coming along and trying to be the latest dictator!"

  Fialux smiled and shook her head. "That's just like you. Trying to convince someone not to take over the world by citing facts and figures at them."

  "That's not what I was trying to do at all," I groused.

  "Then what was the point of that little snit?” she asked.

  "The point was I can't stand it when people go around misusing perfectly good information to try and support their stupid agenda. That's something that seems to be on the rise lately, and I’m not going to stand for it!"

  "You're just mad that we’re conquering your world where you've always failed,” Fialux said.

  "What's that supposed to mean?" I asked, my voice suddenly going into what I liked to call “quietly dangerous” mode.

  "You know exactly what it means," she said. "You always go on about how you're the greatest villain Starlight City has ever seen, but would the greatest villain in the world ever stop at conquering just one city? Not to mention that’s being generous even saying you conquered this place. More like you run around acting like you own the place without actually doing anything.”

  I bristled at the implication of what she was saying. How dare she! The fact that there was some unpleasant truth to her words only served to pile on the annoyance.

  "This is Starlight City!" I said, desperate not to show that her comment dug deeper than I cared to admit. "This is the majors as far as heroics and villainy is concerned. If you make it here you’ve made it everywhere! What's the point in conquering the world? That bit is assumed once you take Starlight City!”

  Fialux shook her head as she smiled. A thin smile that was nothing like the wide sort of smiles she used to give me. Even back when she’d lost her powers.

  "You keep telling yourself that as I swipe your planet out from under you," she said.

  "What's with you?" I asked.

  "What do you mean?" she asked. She blinked her eyes a couple of times. Fluttered her eyelashes as though she was trying to act all sweet and innocent, but I wasn’t buying it.

  "You never used to talk like this. This goes against everything you've ever stood for!"

  She shook her head. Frowned. It was almost as though she was having a cheesy split personality moment or something, but then as quickly as that moment of indecision appeared it was gone. Her face firmed and when she looked at me she looked more like the old Fialux. The one I'd fought time and again before we figured out we were head over heels for each other.

  Not at all like the loving Fialux who could do no wrong in my eyes. Who tried to make me a better person. Even if her trying to make me into a better person had been endlessly frustrating.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "But that's not going to work on me. I've changed. We've changed. And it's time to change this world, too. For the better. I think even you will ultimately be willing to admit that once you see what we can accomplish with our grand army.

  “I’m willing to admit that you're a cut rate wannabe villain who…"

  Something came streaking in and distracted me from the nastiness I was about to spit at my girlfriend. Ex-girlfriend? I suppose it was an open question right now.

  I fought the urge to cheer as my heads up display zeroed in on that streak. I never thought I’d cheer Uncle Sam getting
a jet into the city during a heroic intervention.

  No, scratch that. This wasn't a heroic intervention. I liked to do a little dance around language when it came to heroes and villains fighting one another, but this attack was villainy through and through. And if the government wanted to throw some of their multi-million-dollar toys at this villainy then I was more than happy to see one of them get through.

  They hadn’t been having much luck on that score. It turns out fighting an invading alien army was a hell of a lot more difficult than using smart bombs on Middle Eastern countries that boasted the best of ‘60s and ‘70s military hardware that had been salvaged over the course of numerous wars in the region.

  It looked like in this case that fighter jet that made it through wasn’t going to get very far. No, the aliens didn't even bother to send one of the giant flying saucers after this particular daring son of a bitch who was engaging in some good old-fashioned close quarters fighting. I suppose the pilot figured they had to do that since anything they’d fired from a distance was getting blown out of the sky by alien countermeasures.

  The shock troops fired at the guy and the air behind him, or her I suppose given how the fighter pilot thing had become a unisex occupation, looked like a Fourth of July display. But the pilot was dodging, dipping, ducking, diving, and dodging and doing a pretty good job of it, too.

  Only the alien pursuers were getting closer and closer.

  Something inside me snapped. I couldn't explain it. Just that I couldn't stand the idea of this brave bastard being killed even as he or she managed to pump enough uranium enriched lead into one of those smaller flying saucers to cause it to explode spectacularly. A pilot that ballsy deserved to be rescued!

  Even if she didn’t have balls. You get where I’m going with this.

  "No!" I shouted.

  "No?" Fialux asked. "What are you…"

  I didn't wait for her to figure out what I was doing. I didn’t want to give her an opportunity to stop me, and considering she seemed to have her powers back after her sojourn on that strange alien world I wasn't in the mood to give her any more openings than were necessary.

  I took off as fast as my antigrav would carry me. Which was pretty fast, but not as fast as Fialux when she got up to speed. The clock was ticking.

  The first few shock troops I fired on disappeared in puffs of plasma before I realized what I was doing. My mouth was open and I was screaming at the top of my lungs, and more and more of them disappeared every time I screamed.

  I was just so damn frustrated. I'd fought off several alien invasions before. I was supposed to be getting the key to the damned city for fighting off an alien invasion.

  That wasn’t something I was necessarily happy about considering how heroic it all was, but at the same time the thought that there were aliens doing a successful invasion of the city on the day I was getting congratulated for successfully saving the city from a different alien invasion was frustrating, to say the least.

  So I couldn't really account for my actions. I was running on a furious autopilot. I don't think I'd ever been this angry.

  It didn't help that my girlfriend had finally returned at the head of said invading alien army. Not to mention she'd returned with another woman in tow. A woman who looked oddly familiar. A woman who gave me a touch of the vapors every time I looked at her.

  I didn't recognize her, and yet I had this overwhelming sense that I should know her. That usually meant there was some sort of mind control block going on, and the thought that there was a mind control block somewhere in my head that I hadn't been able to ferret out was even more infuriating.

  "Mistress?"

  I didn't pause in the middle of blasting aliens out of the sky. I was having too much fun exacting my revenge against these alien assholes, but I’d learned the hard way that it paid to listen when CORVAC talked.

  "What is it CORVAC?" I asked. "I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m kind of busy."

  "I've noticed mistress," he said. "But you might want to not let your anger get the best of you. Particularly when you are neglecting to watch your six."

  I whirled around without missing a beat and brought my wrist blaster up. Switched to the anti-Newtonian field and wrapped Fialux in a bubble. I twirled around and flew off, leaving her to get out of that bubble in her own sweet damn time.

  "Thanks for the heads up CORVAC," I said.

  "I would very much enjoy the opportunity to relitigate the last time we fought Fialux," CORVAC said. "I believe the two of us together can defeat her now that we aren't hampered by your feelings and my desire to take over the world without letting you know what I was doing."

  That was enough to make me stop and think. He did have a good point there. The last time the two of us fought Fialux like this we’d both been distracted by our own things.

  I’d been head over heels and reluctant to admit to those feelings, let alone fight her to the full extent of my ability, and he’d been planning his own world domination the entire time which I’m sure was a distraction from the business at hand.

  “I really hope it doesn’t come to that,” I said, so quiet that I almost thought he couldn’t hear me over the death and destruction happening all around me.

  I stopped and hovered. Glanced over my shoulder to check how the anti-Newtonian field was holding up. The thing was a turning a nice bright blue color, which meant I didn’t have long. I stared in open-mouthed amazement. It’d been so long since I’d seen her in all her glory that my combat instincts were rusty. She really could put out power like no one else when she had her powers, but she would keep for maybe another minute or so.

  If I was lucky. Assuming her power now was similar to what it had been before.

  Either way, I had a window of opportunity and I was going to exploit the fuck out of it. It was time to get to work. Sweet, destructive work the likes of which I hadn’t brought down on my enemies since I first rose to villainous prominence.

  It was time to go old school and show these aliens what it meant to fuck with Night Terror. Maybe there was something to Fialux’s taunting, but I’d show her. I’d show them all!

  I tried not to think about how that was the sort of thing that typically ran through a villain’s mind right before a crushing and embarrassing defeat.

  2

  First Battle of Starlight City

  I held my wrist blaster up and pointed it at one of the bigger flying saucers. So far none of the shock troops had been using anything like the shields I used, and I figured it was time to test that out with one of their bigger ships.

  I kept the wrist blaster charging until it was making a very nice ominous hum, and then I let loose with everything I had. The resulting beam fired straight at the nearest flying saucer, but unfortunately it would appear that the bigger guns they were breaking out did have shields.

  No matter. I kept firing with all the power I could muster, and it turns out their shields weren’t nearly as nice as the stuff I was tooling around in. The blast punched through and went right through to the other side of the thing creating a nice beacon in the sky letting everyone in the city know something was going down here.

  I grinned. If I could punch through their shields then I could take on these assholes. I walked the beam around the center until the middle of the thing had been ripped completely free. It fell, gravity reasserting itself, and then stopped falling, but it was listing to the side in an odd way.

  Meanwhile the outside of the flying saucer was definitely moving in an odd direction as well. Clearly these aliens had perfected antigravity emergency stopping technology, something I suspected from the way those alien possessed cats had acted around fixed wing flying technology which they were clearly unfamiliar with, but I hadn't been sure until I saw it operating.

  I wondered if all of these aliens were possessed by those worms, or if this was something else entirely. I hadn’t seen anything resembling a cat, after all, which seemed to be the main vector for worm mind contr
ol enslavement in humans.

  "Could you go ahead and bring in the drones?" I asked.

  "Mistress?" CORVAC asked.

  "Usually I like to fight these invasions off at the heliopause where they can't cause too much damage, but if they're going to bring the fight here to earth then you bet your ass I'm going to make sure they get a good one."

  "I was hoping you would say something like that mistress," CORVAC said. "So I have full autonomy?"

  I paused and thought about that. On the one hand I still didn't particularly trust CORVAC. Not entirely. But on the other hand he had been there every step of the way through the last invasion. There’d been so many opportunities to screw me over, and yet he hadn’t.

  Yet.

  What ultimately decided me was the simple fact that he’d never needed to ask permission for full autonomy to begin with, and he knew it. That he was asking for that permission when he didn't have to told me everything I knew about his rehabilitation since the last time he tried to kill me and take over the world.

  "You know what CORVAC?" I said. "You've been a good boy. Have fun. It's open season on alien invaders."

  I paused to check the feed from the Starlight City News Network. That magnificent bitch Nancy Norris had somehow talked her way up to the top of the city hall building and was reporting on everything. And apparently her new cameraman had balls of steel, because he was catching everything as it happened. Including all of the many explosions and weapons going off all around them putting them in mortal danger.