Story: Under the Milky Way Tonight (chapter 14)

Shego slashed through the elevator roof and dropped in, perspiring slightly. “Of course Junior makes sure the elevator car stays at the bottom of the shaft,” she muttered. Good thing she had her claws back.

She pried the elevator doors open and found herself in a pitch-black room. Shego shook her head. Junior was probably hiding by now. He was all out of . . .

"Good evening, Ms. Possible. I've been waiting for you."

The hairs all over her body stood up. Not because the voice didn't belong to Junior, but because she knew who it did belong to. Or belonged to anyway.

The lights suddenly came on, and Shego found herself in a large nondescript circular room. The only machinery was on the side opposite her, a mishmash of oversized electrical cables and advanced computers, crowned by three glass domes. The smaller ones to the left and right were empty.

Inside the middle one was Mrs. Acceptable.

"Oh, it's only you," she said when she saw Shego, disappointed. "John's pet."

Shego could feel the hatred and loathing bubbling up her throat like a physical force. "And you're just another clone," she said with revulsion.

"Well, I 'died' in the same place my children did," Mrs. Acceptable replied. "My DNA was waiting to be found too."

"And you're Junior's toady now."

Mrs. Acceptable chuckled maliciously. "No, can't say that I am, Shego. I'm here under most unwilling circumstances, actually. I couldn't get out of this machine if I wanted to. And I did want to, until I found out that murdering slut girlfriend of yours was coming."

"Don't talk about her that way!" Shego erupted.

"There was a time you would have received quite a jolt for such backtalk."

"Yeah," Shego said, "that worked REAL well on your children. You know, the ones who tried to kill you too?"

Mrs. Acceptable frowned. "You should talk. Your friend Dr. Director stole my child!"

"You were dead! And you were experimenting on Tommy!"

"Tommy? Aw, so you're fond of him. How sweet."

"And I'm very not fond of you. How frightening."

"Yes, well, I have new children now."

Shego laughed. "Kimmie and I beat their asses a little while ago."

"Those things are not mine," Mrs. Acceptable said scornfully. "And Thomas, well, he was special, but he wasn't . . . perfect."

The other two domes, it turned out, were not empty. Their occupants had merely been kneeling and bent over. They rose now, and Shego took a step back.

"You are imperfect," the two Bebes said.

"Wuh-oh."

"Protect your queen! Destroy her!" the new Bebe Queen commanded.

"In-cog-nito, my dear KP," Ron said. "Got me into Junior's chambers earlier. And I got him to shut off whatever deathtrap you and Shego were in, so you're welcome."

Kim stared at him. "That was - it was because of you?"

Ron blinked at the intensity of her gaze. "Uh, yeah, I mean, I'm sure you would have gotten out of it yourselves, I didn't mean to ruin it for - "

She almost knocked him over with the fiercest of hugs. "Thanks, Ron. Thank you so, so much."

He hugged her back.

"If Shego and I ever have babies," Kim told him, pulling back, "I want your sperm."

"TMI!" Ron and Monique said at the same time. "Jinx, you owe me a soda!" Monique added.

"Awww, man, I never get those," Ron complained.

Yori finished tying up Gemini. "I have rendered his hand nonfunctional," she reported. "He is no threat to us."

Kim turned to look at the WEE former leader. She swayed a moment as she did so. Whatever the Battle Suit was doing to her injuries, it felt weird. Not unpleasant, but she did feel a bit weak. "You've lost, Gemini. You couldn’t even defeat us by blowing yourself up.”

“It would have been worth it so that the world might know that it was I who defeated you all,” Gemini said fervently.

“Ego still taking the demotion kinda hard, huh?”

Gemini sat and seethed.

“And I assume you heard that my family, not to mention YOURS, is safe," Kim went on.

"Yes, well, Betty was always too clever for her own good."

Monique tugged at her new clothes. "Pink and gray men's tights, ugh. Not even I can make this look good - especially when they're riding up my butt. You got a problem with women agents, Shelly?"

"Considering women have been the bane of my existence? Uh, yes!"

"We don't have time for this," Kim said. "We've got to find Shego and help her stop Junior's machine."

Gemini chuckled.

"What?" Ron asked.

"Good luck getting through that door," he said, sneering. "It's solid steel."

"It seemed to open just fine earlier," Kim said.

"That was before someone went through them."

Kim tensed. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Gemini shrugged. "All I know is Senor Senior Junior wanted me to make sure you entered first, Ms. Possible. I imagine he had something special planned just for you."

"KP does get all the best deathtraps," Ron said.

Kim stopped wasting her time with him. Shego was all alone in there, and - she ran for the door. Sure enough, it wasn't responding. "Damn," she whispered.

"Kim."

"Wade?" Kim asked, grabbing for the WEE communicator. "Shego's trapped behind this door, and I can't open it. Could you do something about this?"

"Kim, about five seconds ago the station began diverting all power, except for essential functions, to a location below you. I don't think any door will open now."

"The moon machine," Kim realized. "Can't you shut it off?"

"I’ve tried, Kim, but they've installed some kind of special safeguard. According to the error messages I keep getting, somewhere below you is some kind of switch, and if it's thrown manually, it acts as a kind of massive circuit breaker and terminates the whole process. Other than that, this machine is like a snowball rolling down a hill. No brakes, no engine, just gravity. Someone needs to physically push the button, so to speak. It's really archaic, if you ask me."

Kim sighed. "I'd say 'archaic' is doing a good job of stopping us so far." Shego had eluded one deathtrap through the skin of her teeth. Kim couldn't bear to think of her in a second one in one night. But if she couldn't open that door . . .

She looked at Yori. "Yori, how 'nonfunctional' is Gemini’s hand exactly?"

"They're not very individualistic, but then I never really needed that in a child," Queen Acceptable mused.

One of the Bebes helped Shego back up by landing an uppercut to her chin, and then was gone again. Blood splashed out of Shego's mouth as she landed wobbly on her feet. There had been other blows like that one, hard, fast, unblockable. She'd lost count after her nose was all but broken. She’d choked on her own blood more than once.

If she could just get them to stop for one moment . . . even though their exteriors were shielded from plasma, Shego knew eleven different ways from the Drakken days to dismantle them. But there was no way she could do that now. From the Bebes’ perspective, Shego was as stationary as Mrs. Acceptable was.

Shego rubbed her lips with her arm and gazed at the new Bebe Queen with narrowed eyes. They'd been given two commands, and "protect your queen" came first. Drakken's Bebes would have interpreted that as being the primary directive, and therefore more important than "destroy her".

She couldn't simply charge the Queen, since they could stop her in her tracks in less than an instant.

And they'd just block any thrown plasma and be gone again before Shego could say "doy".

But if she combined the two . . .

Before they got around to stretching her out on the floor again, Shego hurled two concentrated balls of plasma, one green, one black. They headed straight for Queen Acceptable, and Shego ran right behind them.

From the Bebes’ perspective, there were two threats to the Queen. Both could be neutralized easily. Human logic would dictate that one take care of the plasma, and the other take care of Shego.

The Bebes couldn’t delegate, however. Programming logic stated that the plasma was the more imminent danger, and therefore had to be neutralized first. Each Bebe would have to defend their queen before Shego could be dealt with.

So, for just a mere second, each Bebe stopped directly in the path of a plasma ball before they’d traveled more than a foot. The plasma splashed harmlessly against their metallic chests.

Shego was just a human, but with her reflexes, a second was nothing. For that brief instant where the Bebes weren't moving, where there was still so little space between her and them, and where Shego could know to a certainty what their location would be, Shego's clawed fingers darted forward. Knowing their height dimensions from her sidekick days, she sent small but highly intense charges toward where their faces should be.

Most of the Bebes’ bodies were plasma-shielded. One of the reasons for the “most” was the lenses that were their “eyes”. Shego’s plasma couldn’t even scratch their faces, but a fraction of plasma energy shattered the lenses and penetrated into their heads. That energy was enough to fry a good deal of the microchips and intricate, highly sensitive wiring inside. That in turn sparked a chain reaction that started burning through their entire bodies.

"Not per - not - nnnnnnnnnnnn - "

Shego casually walked around the two robots, now that they'd stopped moving. She waited for a moment as their bodies jerked and swayed due to the total internal meltdown, and then putting a hand on their backs, she pushed.

The two Bebes crashed down onto the floor, and almost immediately their outer shells began to give off clouds of dark smoke.

"Sorry about your deathtrap, Your Majesty," Shego said, gingerly testing her nose. No, not broken, so she didn't need to reset the bones herself.

Mrs. Acceptable shrugged. "They weren't the trap. Junior thought Ms. Possible would find a way to win. So did I. I didn't think YOU could, but I guess nothing's perfect after all."

Shego chuckled. "So who's the deathtrap? YOU?"

"In a manner of speaking."

"Gonna make me feel bad about myself to death?"

"Have you ever heard of a kill switch?"

"Of course."

"Well, that's me," Mrs. Acceptable said. "I'm the switch. You want to flip me? You have to kill me."

Shego didn't understand. "You're a switch? Flip you? I don't get it."

"You always did need to have things explained to you," Mrs. Acceptable said wickedly. "Right now, there's a device located in an extremely deep hole in the moon's surface. You may have seen the hole when you were ambushed earlier. Think of it as an energy well. You just fill it with power. Eventually, the energy being fed into it exceeds its containment limits, and it explodes. That's what the station is doing right now. All available power is being diverted through the cables that are anchoring this station to the far side of the moon, and then through other cables along the moon’s surface into the well. If this goes on for long enough, the well reaches critical mass and explodes. And THAT explosion, Shego, will be big enough to take a major chunk out of the moon. Maybe even break it into several smaller pieces."

"Gemini told the government the device was just supposed to affect the Earth’s tides. That sounds a little more catastrophic," Shego said, frowning. Breaking the moon - that sounded like civilization-ending stuff.

"That's because Junior lied to him. Junior is just insane enough to destroy the planet if he doesn't get what he wants." She smiled beatifically. "I'd like to think I drove him to that. Of course, his father can be blamed for making him spoiled enough, I suppose."

"And you're saying that if I kill you - "

"This machine monitors my heart rate. If my heart stops for a full sixty seconds, a circuit breaker is tripped and the station stops feeding the energy well. So yes, only my death will save the world."

Shego looked at her. “And you expect me to believe that shit? Why would Junior stash you here when he already had a deathtrap ready for us upstairs?”

That penetrated Mrs. Acceptable’s malevolent good cheer, and her lips puckered like she’d sucked on a lemon. “Originally I was cloned and placed here for my own punishment,” she said. “Junior wanted me to know what it was like to have no control over my own life. The Bebes were as much my jailers as they were my protectors. He also claimed that my heart might as well be good for something. Apparently this trap is a happy coincidence for him.”

“Even so, I’ll just destroy those machines, and then I’ll take you to your twisted daughter so you can prepare for life in a women’s penitentiary. Just between you and me, it’s not safe to drop the soap there either.”

Mrs. Acceptable sneered at her. “Now who’s talking shit? Do you really think he’d go to all this trouble, and then leave a gaping loophole like that? Sure, go ahead, destroy them! You always were so foolishly impatient. But you won’t be able to take it back if you’re wro-ong.”

Shego swore, but Mrs. Acceptable just gave her an especially nasty smile. "Now imagine if you were Kim Possible, and I just told you all of that."

Shego nodded slowly. Kim was even more bitterly opposed to killing than she had been before the showdown with the Acceptables. And she'd be given the choice of either letting the world die, or violating her own convictions and taking a second human life. Shego realized that while Mrs. Acceptable believed this had been all about punishing her, on some subconscious level for Junior it was no coincidence that Mrs. Acceptable was here. Maybe Junior believed in his heart that Kim would either be crushed or killed by the Acceptable siblings, but deep down Junior had prepared for the worst, and purposely selected as his kill switch the person who most symbolized Kim’s decision to take a human life.

This was exactly the same kind of trap as the one from before, a psychological one. It was designed to cripple Kim, attack her where she was most vulnerable, make her beat herself, and destroy her from within. First Kim had been asked to sacrifice her lover to save the world. Now she was being asked to . . .

Shego blinked. Oh, how devious. Mrs. Acceptable, in a way, represented a second chance for Kim. If she were to live, it could be as if the killing never took place. Oh sure, Kimmie would still see herself as a killer, but maybe it would be easier to take if there was no longer a body somewhere. And instead, Kim would have to murder her all over again. Junior obviously hoped that would break Pumpkin. It was very diabolical and incredibly cruel.

How she hated him right now.

"Just one problem, though," Shego said angrily. "You didn't get Kimmie, you got me. And I have no problem snapping your neck, you sadistic, monstrous bitch."

"Why yes, you're right, Shego! Soon you'll be a killer too, just as bad as Kim Possible! You'll be able to know exactly how she feels! And I'm sure she would accept your decision. I mean, I'm sure she hasn't done anything so foolish as to order her 'team' not to kill anybody."

Shego froze before the mental image of how disappointed in her Kim would be when she found out. And Kim would blame herself too. Maybe if she'd done something differently, Kim would think, she could have prevented Shego from making the same mistake she made. Maybe it was Kim's fault that Shego was a murderer.

She looked at her hands. It had been a conscious decision years before not to kill. She had never seriously reevaluated that decision. Now Shego swallowed. Years later, killing didn't feel any easier. It felt harder.

“Or think of it this way – you can be as bad as me! I’m bad, aren’t I?” The Bebe Queen tried to look naughty, but she came across as demented instead. “I’m going to play a part in the death of humanity, and I love it!”

Shego looked into the other woman’s face and knew despair. What were her other options? To let the world be destroyed? To wait for Kimmie to arrive, assuming the energy bomb would wait that long, and foist the decision off on her like Junior had intended? To put the burden on the shoulders of Monique? Ron? Maybe Yori, she’d killed in the line of duty, right?

Another Shego might have been appalled by yet another sign that she was going “soft”, but that didn’t even factor into this Shego’s decision any longer. Her life was changing so fast! Even the Bebes’ speed paled by comparison. She wasn’t the same person she was five years ago, or even five weeks.

And in five minutes, she’d be another person entirely.

“A while back,” Shego said, “after Kimmie put you down like a rabid dog, she said she thought I was better than her, because she had killed and I hadn’t.”

“And we all know how you need to be better than her,” Queen Acceptable sneered.

“I need to be better than everyone else," Shego corrected her. "I can't be better than her, not for long. Our life together is a constant state of competition. We live to surpass the other, even if it’s just for a day, because we both know no one else is on our level."

"My," the clone said dryly. "Maybe you can't spell K-I-M without E-G-O either."

Shego barely heard what the other woman was saying. "Knowing Kimmie, part of her still believes I'm better than her. That I'll always be a better person than her. And I refuse to let her believe that any longer."

There was a moment of silence while Mrs. Acceptable digested her last comment. A trickle of worry crossed her face.

Then Shego leapt atop the machines. Legs spread, she stood above Mrs. Acceptable and looked into her eyes. Charging up her gloves, she began driving crushing lefts and rights into the only barrier between her and the "switch".

"Wait," Mrs. Acceptable said shrilly, giving way to panic, "what are you doing? You can't mean this!"

"Watch me."

The tempered glass cracked, then buckled, and then shattered under the relentless battering. Shards pelted Mrs. Acceptable's face, and she shrieked as one sliced her left cheek.

Shego's left arm shot through the hole she'd smashed. The plasma in her glove vanished as her hand clamped over Mrs. Acceptable's mouth. Shego kept the left side of her hand firmly wedged against the woman's nostrils.

Mrs. Acceptable began frantically pulling at Shego's arm while she shook her head back and forth, trying to dislodge Shego's grip. Her face turned red from both the exertion and the lack of oxygen.

But Shego had been right. She was the best. Mrs. Acceptable was far from the best. She might as well have tried to fight a steel rod for dominance. The trapped woman could barely move within her computerized cage, and tears rolled down her face as the clawed tips of Shego's gloved fingers dug into her cheeks for a better grip, leaving four beads of blood welling.

"This isn't vengeance," Shego whispered.

Mrs. Acceptable's struggles began to falter. Her arms sagged, then drooped limply like the petals on a dead flower.

"This is about saving Kim."

Shego began to realize that she was breathing heavily, almost in gulps, as if she was breathing for both of them. Which wasn't necessary, since the other woman would never need to breathe again. Shego hesitantly let go. Her fingertips were wet with blood, and she wiped them on Mrs. Acceptable's blouse.

The machines kept humming, and Shego waited. There appeared to be dozens of cables that had been surgically implanted into Mrs. Acceptable's thighs and calves. She could see signs that others were attached to her lower back. These were obviously monitoring her heart rate and pulse.

She wondered again if Mrs. Acceptable had lied to her. Maybe destroying the machines would have succeeded. Or maybe nothing could stop the bomb from exploding. But Junior couldn't be that eager for death - could he?

Fifty-seven . . . fifty-eight . . . fifty-nine . . .

She felt the computers go off before she saw it. Some lights stayed on, but the hum, the internal motion of the machines - that was gone. More importantly, the vibrations in the floor had ceased. That had to mean it was over. Planet - and one orbiting rock - saved.

"I'm glad I killed you. I'm glad you're dead," Shego said coldly. "I am, I am!"

To be continued . . .