the door shuddered as something slammed into it from the other side. “That might do,” he muttered. “But we’ve no time to waste.”
“But we should be okay now, right?” Agatha looked around with interest. “Once we equip ourselves from your arsenal, those things shouldn’t stand a chance.”
Gil looked blank. “My what?”
“Your weapons. The stuff you’ve built.” Agatha rubbed her hands together in gleeful anticipation. “I wondered where they were. So any chance of a good Death Ray? That’d be perfect!”
Gil looked appalled. “I don’t have a Death Ray!”
Agatha blinked. “What, it’s an early prototype or something?”
“I don’t have a Death Ray.”
A sudden realization filled Agatha. She blushed in sympathy and with a gentle smile she placed a hand on his arm. “I’m sure that next time you’ll build a much bigger one, but trust me, right now any Death Ray, will do, no matter how—”
“I. DO. NOT. HAVE. A. DEATH. RAY!” Gil shouted.
Agatha stared at him in disbelief, and with an exasperated puff blew a lock of hair out of her face. “Don’t be ridiculous. Dr. Beetle had stuff like that all over the place. You must have something.” She scratched her nose. “Sonic Cannon?”
“No.”
“Disintegration Beam?”
“No.”
“You must have some sort of Doomsday Device. We can modify it. Come on, it’ll be fun.”
“I don’t have
They stared at each other.
“Fine. So what you’re telling me is that you—Gilgamesh Wulfenbach—the person next in line to the despotic, iron-fisted rule of the Wulfenbach Empire—have no deadly, powerful weapons lying around whatsoever! That’s just great! What kind of an Evil Overlord are you going to be, anyway?”
“Apparently a better one than I’d thought,” Gil said, suddenly thoughtful.
Suddenly, with a series of sharp thuds, a swordlike arm punched its way through the door. It was joined by several others, and using the opening, rapidly expanded it.
A canister of old fencing swords was next to a cupboard. Gil grabbed two and faced off against the wasps struggling to get at them. “Build something!” he ordered Agatha.
“What?”
“I’ll hold them off, you build your own damn Death Ray!”
“But I don’t know how! You should—”
“You can’t fight—but you’re a Spark!”
“But—”
“Or we’ll die—or worse!” With that he turned away from her and sliced away at a wasp that had managed to cram itself through the door.
Agatha backed into a corner. “Got to think.” She gasped as a razor-edged claw sliced through Gil’s boot. Deliberately she turned away. “Got to think!” The noise was becoming overwhelming. It sounded like dozens of creatures hammering and tearing away at the metal door. Sounds became magnified. The sound of sword striking chitin, the smashing of equipment, the slow rending of the metal door, even the slow steady breathing of Gil as he wove a curtain of death before him.
“Too much noise,” Agatha whispered. “I have to think.” And softly at first, then quickly gaining strength, a complicated atonal humming filled the room. Agatha stood stock still for several seconds, and then her head snapped forward, her eyes filled with a furious purpose.
Meanwhile Gil found himself being slowly pushed back by the sheer weight of numbers. It didn’t help that the wasps seemed capable of taking an extraordinary amount of damage before their brain admitted that they were dead, and even in death, they tended to lash out, as the numerous tears ands gashes covering his arms and legs attested to. “I’d better be right about you,” he muttered. One of the swords bent as it hit an internal structure. He was only barely able to wrench it out in time to parry a darting bladelike arm. A wrenching groan was his only warning, but he was able to leap backwards as a section of the ceiling collapsed, raining a fresh wave of Slaver wasps across the floor. Another step backwards and he found himself surrounded by empty canisters, which were just tall enough to hamper his movement. Suddenly his swords were occupied and another bug flashed towards him, its saberlike arms upraised.
A pair of copper rods drove into the wasp’s eye. And a cascade of sparks erupted. The creature jerked frantically and then collapsed. The other wasps froze in surprise. Gil looked behind him.
There stood Agatha, a fierce grin on her face. In one hand she had the mysterious Heterodyne sphere. Connected to it was a supple cable, which ended at a bizarre-looking swordlike object, which crackled and continually threw off great arcing Jacobs ladders. “HA!” she cried. “It works!”
Gilgamesh scrambled to his feet. “You did it!”
“Sure did.” Agatha tossed him a large rubberized gauntlet, identical to the one she was wearing on her right hand. He quickly slid it on as she tossed him another sword, which was also attached to the glowing blue orb. “Here. You’re the fencer.”
Together they returned their attention to the again advancing bugs. Whenever they touched the wasps, the insects jerked and died instantly. “You used part of my lightning generator,” Gil observed.
“Yes, the Heterodyne device can recharge it instantly.”
“Good job. I never thought to test it as a power source, but I’d really thought there was more to it.” As he said this, both he and Agatha smacked the same bug at the same time. It jerked once, crackling, and when they swung their swords away, it clattered to the ground like a collection of scrap iron.
They pushed out into the hallway, effortlessly scything down wasps. Gil nodded approvingly as Agatha swept her sword in an arc that took out three wasps at one swipe. “I thought you didn’t fence,” he remarked.
“This isn’t fencing!” she retorted. “This is swinging wildly!” A frantic series of such swings on both of their parts brought them almost face to face, slightly tangled in the cords. Gil’s face was glistening with sweat and a small cut oozed on his cheek. Agatha was breathing heavily and grimly determined. Their eyes locked. They froze and swayed fractionally closer—and then whirled away as an attacking arm slashed through the place they’d been.
“Couldn’t you have used a longer cable?” Gil groused.
“It’s what was there,” Agatha snarled.
Gil shrugged. “Okay. So now what do we do?”
Agatha looked at him askance as she fried an unwary wasp. “Um… we should try to get out of here?”
“We could head for the exit,” Gil conceded, “but that won’t solve the problem.”
“You’re saying we have to stop them at the source. We’ve got to destroy the Hive Engine.”
“As long as we’re here.”
Agatha drove her sword up into a wasp’s mouth causing its head to explode. “Then we’d better get going.”
Around Castle Wulfenbach, the ever-present cloud of attendant airships began to shift. Ships carrying emergency crew and marines began to head towards loading docks, while shuttle and passenger ships removed non-essential personnel.
One such ship was carrying away the students and other children. On one of the observation decks, Theo had commandeered the largest of the great brass telescopes and was training it upon the laboratory decks. “Well,” he reported to the others, “there’s wasps all over the place. But I still don’t see any resistance.”
“Let me look,” said Sleipnir. Theo yielded the telescope.
“At least I couldn’t see any outside the lab area,” he said, “so I guess the doors—”
“Omigosh!” Sleipnir yelled. “It’s Gil and Agatha! They’re in the labs! They’re fighting wasps!”
“Let me see!”
Sleipnir defended her position with a deft kick to Theo’s knee. “They’re using swords and—wait. They just vanished!”
“What?”
