Helena Burnley vs Professor Endtimes - Part Six: The Super Stunner

               The Stunner raced along the rooftops, rubbing at her sore knuckles. Shedder's face had been surprisingly hard, and his helmet had been unsurprisingly harder. Using hammers, batteries, and whips had spoiled her, and made her forget the aftermath of hand-to-hand combat. She yearned for the simple, gentle embrace of a trigger; knees could be shot with no exertion or broken skin at all.
                Helena's regret at immediately informing Professor Endtimes of Shedder's capture was as prompt as it was severe. On the one hand it had neatly headed off any 'why didn't you tell me sooner’ scenarios, but it had also bricked her into a corner. There was scarce little time now to formulate a plan of action or a solid cover story. Improvisation had been good to Helena in the past, but she wished she hadn't made herself rely on it. Since the rooftops held very little by way of magical objects or genies, her wish went un-granted; she’d have to think about a solution to this problem the old-fashioned way.
                In her head Agent Burnley tried to run over the facts and work out what on Earth she could possibly tell the professor, but conflicting thoughts clashed with one another, damming her stream of consciousness. She only had a day until Shedder was lucid, two at most, and panic was making a concerted effort to seep into her mind, rotting her thought processes like an unseen crack in the plumbing rots a floorboard.
                She shook her head in attempt to flick those worries out of her ears. They weren’t helping, and she suspected that they hadn’t even been trying to. Drawing as deep of a breath as she could after a desperate chase, a fight, and then another sprint, The Stunner forced herself to consider the data properly.
                Professor Endtimes had sent her and the others to rescue Shedder, but they couldn’t necessarily have known that it had been him specifically in danger; the professor wasn’t one to keep operational details like that a secret. Shedder, Professor Endtimes, and The Chauffeur had then spoken and come back to perform the biggest jailbreak in ministry history, which they felt safe doing because Shedder had been staking out the station. Endtimes’ complicity in this blatant attack meant that he was significantly stepping up his operation; it was on a whole new scale compared to the bathtub heist, the Tooth’s Bane job, or even the kidnapping of Agent Katter. Perhaps Fuzzykins was closer to completion than she had anticipated, whatever it might be. What Helena didn’t understand, though, was that even if they’d managed to pull the jailbreak off, the whole city's police and military forces would be after the escaped convicts and the professor immediately. There's no way he could fight off that many officers or soldiers without an army of his own, or maybe a…
                The Stunner’s legs lost all impulsion, gradually slowing from a sprint to a standstill as her arms fell limp by her sides. Standing still on the roof, her stare found middle distance and settled there for the foreseeable future which, like most of the things she was facing, was mostly out of focus.
                The professor would never be able to break out all of those villains and fight off the ministry without an army of his own or a super weapon, and The Stunner had spent the last month trying to deliver him one. The professor had used her to give himself freedom of action across the whole city. The Chauffeur had said it that morning: everyone the professor enters into business with is useful. The Glazier had helped him construct an underground lair in his home, Garagio had built him a vehicular safe haven, The Chauffeur gave him anonymous transportation, The Librarian kept the ministry busy chasing a shadow, Confectionista armed him with drugged confectionery, and The Stunner had given him the means to subjugate a whole city. Shedder and The Glazier had been intended to remove ministry agents from play one at a time, but then The Stunner had come along and provided him with alternative means to ensure his own safety and cripple the ministry. Now, Shedder was supposed to give the professor all his captured associates back, ready for whatever he was planning with Operation Fuzzykins.
                Commissioner Harmon had warned her against this. He’d told her that Professor Endtimes wanted to use The Stunner for his own ends. Now she had her proof that he’d been right.
                The Stunner rubbed both hands against her face, shortly before remembering that she’d just held Shedder’s mouth shut with them. She shuddered and wiped cheek against shoulder as best she could to feel some semblance of cleanliness. Melancholic maelstroms threatened to engulf her when she thought about what she might have wrought into the world for Professor Endtimes. She couldn’t trust her own judgement anymore; the professor had managed to manipulate her into arming him, all whilst making her think that it was him doing a favour for her. She had to end this immediately, there was no more time to try gathering evidence of past wrongdoings or data on Operation Fuzzykins.
                There was a glimmer of hope, however; a small patch of clear sky. Even if Endtimes intended to deploy it that night, The Super Stunner wasn’t yet completed; there were missing pylons, and none of them were scheduled for mounting yet. If the ministry struck now then they might still be able to stop him. Despite the wrongdoings in which she’d been involved, Helena hadn’t been able to complete a satisfactorily comprehensive case against the professor, especially since his name was never tied to anything. However, there was probably enough evidence to justify a warrant and an arrest, and her testimony would surely count for something. All she could do was keep Professor Endtimes distracted for long enough for the ministry to get to him. If she could find out anything more about Operation Fuzzykins to ensure that she could stop it then so much the better, but the case was over her head now. The ministry could handle the rest.
                The wave of shock cleared and The Stunner set off again, back towards Daubenton’s Cannery, to meet The Chauffeur, and complete The Stunner’s last job.
 
                Back at the cannery Helena gathered her equipment together, swept up the shards of broken mug, and organised herself for the best plan she could muster. With Shedder in custody, her identity would be revealed to the military element of the ministry as soon as he was lucid. That would put her old colleagues in extreme danger unless she could prove that she was still operating undercover for them, and wasn’t a defector whom they were shielding. As such, the only recourse she had was to tip the ministry off to Professor Endtimes’ address and hope that they got to him quickly. But first she needed to be there with him, to confirm his location and to be able to keep him in place.
                From a pile on her desk, Helena retrieved the address card that The Chauffeur had given her when they’d first met and pushed it into her pocket. Then, dashing around the office, Helena stuffed her duffle bag with all of The Stunner’s gear, her service revolver and handcuffs, and her police radio. The cannery looked on with anxious uncertainty, knowing that something serious was going on and suspecting that it had something to do with the awful man who’d been mean to The Stunner moments earlier. Recognising the determination on her face, it made no effort to stop Helena as she made her over-equipped way towards the door to wait for The Chauffeur.
 
                “What happened, ma’am?” The Chauffeur asked as The Stunner climbed into the same burgundy car from that morning. His voice was questioning but not in the emotionless, professional, non-judgemental tone he usually employed. It had been tainted by concern, and smothered in accusation.
                “Shedder was crooked. He stole incriminating items from me to sell my alias out to the ministry.” She told him angrily. She was so furious at herself for letting things get this far that it came effortlessly.
                “What do you mean by incriminating items?”
                “My wallet.” the Stunner replied. “With my ID in it.” She added for clarity, just in case The Chauffeur was unaware of what wallets were typically used for.
                “What on earth was that doing in your hideout, if I may be so bold?” He pushed.
                “Because my hideout is also where I am living. I thought you knew that? This is why I was asking for somewhere more appropriate to store that traitor.” The Stunner snapped.
                “Hm... it seems that there have been many oversights made in this.”
                “It does.” She agreed.
                “And how did Shedder make it into the hands of the ministry?”
                “I caught up to him and took my stuff back, but I was surrounded in the street. By the time I’d put him down the ministry were already on the way. There’s no way I would have made it out with Shedder over my shoulders.” She said, largely revealig the truth but perhaps dressing it in the wrong outfit.
                “That’s scarcely better, ma’am. He still knows your other name, and much about Professor Endtimes. The ministry will have their information all the same.” The Chauffeur observed, frustratingly accurately.
                “There was nothing I could do.” The Stunner said defensively.
                The Chauffeur didn’t respond.
                Staring silently from the windows of the burgundy saloon, something tall caught The Stunner’s eye, rising from the edge of a high street roof. It jutted at an angle and overhung the street below in a manner which was all too familiar. As it drew closer and grew clearer she recognised the steel framework, the thick cabling running along the core, and the coils wound around the top. Professor Endtimes had gone ahead and mounted the Super Stunner pylons. He had definitely been planning to use it after the jailbreak; it was the only explanation Helena could think of.
                Yet another wave of abject horror swept over The Stunner, a rip-tide engulfing a paddling child. She had been banking on the Super Stunner remaining non-operational; if it was working then even if the ministry was called in they might not be able to stop him. There weren’t enough pylons built to complete the network though, so the professor must have somehow prioritised important locations. If she could find out which ones, and therefore where the blind spots were, then maybe she could get the information to the ministry in time. ‘Maybe’ wasn’t perfect, but it was all she had.
                When they finally reached the professor’s lair, The Chauffeur parked his car in the middle of the road, making sure to block the only available parking spaces whilst doing so, and walked to the door with The Stunner.
                “Are you coming in as well?” she asked with some surprise as he followed her along the path, looking over his shoulder at the obstruction he was making of his car.
                “The professor is working the basement to mitigate any damage that Shedder could cause. He has asked that I let you in, and for you to head to him directly.” The Chauffeur informed her.
                “Got it.” She replied uneasily. This was completely unprecedented. The professor must have been worried.
                The Chauffeur pulled a key from the lining of his jacket and pushed it into the door, a satisfying latching sound welcoming The Stunner back into Endtimes’ lair.
                “I shall be nearby, ma’am.” He said, gesturing that she should enter the house.
                “OK, thanks.” The Stunner replied, still worrying about the cold edge which had been skirting around his voice for the whole journey.
                Going against every fibre of her being, The Stunner took herself directly to the cellar without stopping off at the kitchen for cakes or tea. Long and empty loomed the conference table, vaguely reflecting patches of white from the TV screens on the wall beyond but otherwise showing no signs of use. To one side, the door to Professor Endtimes’ office was facing directly towards her. Like a guilty schoolgirl who’d just beaten a fellow student, drugged them, and then had them arrested by military police, The Stunner walked reluctantly towards Professor Endtimes' cellar office to relay the bad news about Shedder. When she reached the polished steel door she found it slightly ajar. Through the gap, Professor Endtimes’ musing voice escaped into the emptiness of the cellar. The Stunner stole a furtive look around herself and saw no hench-people watching. Leaning close to the gap, she listened.
                "... you goon. It doesn't work that way. If the trigger sits that low then it won't catch the momentum of the blast. That's what went wrong in Colombia, that exact foul-up; stop making the same mistakes! Argh how would you even get it far enough down from up there?  Think, man." The sound of a pen scratching idly across paper rang through the room. "It needs a rethink, but there's so little time, now. They'll ruin it if I let them handle it on their own; the whole structure will crumble in and we’ll be back to square one again."
                The sound of another door opening into the conference room made The Stunner jump, and reflexively she knocked rapidly on the door of the professor's office. Such was the force of her rapping, she pushed the door open and unveiled a mildly bemused and significantly displeased looking Professor Endtimes, sitting behind his desk with one hand lost in his unkempt white hair.
                "Stunner! What happened out there?" he demanded, looking at his right hand woman standing with her own right hand still held up where she’d knocked.
                "Shedder betrayed us. He tried stealing my alias's ID and selling me out to the ministry. He was going to tell them where your lair is too. The jailbreak was a trap." She blurted, offering several disjointed elements of her cover story all at once whilst moving into the room.
                “Betrayed us? A trap? We just saved him for goodness sake! How could he orchestrate that?”
                “I… I don’t know how, professor, but it’s what happened. Maybe he got scared by how much force there was when the ministry was trying to arrest him and thought it was his best shot? Maybe it was just revenge at being left on the run for so long?” The Stunner suggested. She had been struggling to think of a decent justification ever since making the accusation.
                "This is difficult for me to hear, Stunner.” Professor Endtimes said, his head drooping. “Shedder was a loose cannon and I was struggling to forgive him for nearly burning that poor hostage to death in the garden centre, but it was all in a passion to strike out at the ministry and deliver me one of the agents. To think, he nearly had Helena Burnley of all people! He let me down there as well, of course, but the original problem was that he was just too spiteful against the ministry. I can't see him suddenly turning around and helping them." The professor reasoned.
                "There was something odd about him all along, professor. He was extremely confrontational for someone who had just been rescued. Kept trying to pick a fight with me. I don't pretend to know what's gone on with him but he seemed like he had already been broken somehow." She persisted, dragging Shedder’s name through the mud as if he were a plough.
                Professor Endtimes sighed and rested his head in his hands, propped up by his elbows on the desk.  He was like the statue of the thinking man, except completely different.
                "I am still yet to conduct a debrief with The Chauffeur. I trust his perspective on these matters; he can tell me if Shedder seemed different to before. Thank you for being candid Stunner, and for protecting my organisation. But your message to The Chauffeur said that you let the ministry get him, correct? He is in their hands and ready to divulge all this information anyway?" Professor Endtimes interrogated, making the same perfectly reasonable leap of logic that The Chauffeur had.
                "But without any proof” The Stunner offered weakly “and he won't be saying much for a while."
                The professor pulled a puzzled frown.
                "By which you mean..."
                "I had to get a little, erm, war-crimey. I roughed up his jaw pretty badly and pumped him full of Confectionista's hallucinogens and tranquilisers. We still have a day or two, I think." She confessed.
                "How fortuitous.” Professor Endtimes said unconvincingly. “Good, if brutal, work. Do you mind if I ask how you came to have these items so serendipitously?"
                "I saw Confectionista using them and felt they could save my life at some point. Turns out they saved even more than that."
                The professor stood in silent contemplation of The Stunner's words. His eyes were locked on hers as if waiting for a 'true' or 'false' sign to pop up behind them. Proving that she wasn't constructed like a televised quiz game, no such signs appeared.
                "You always have been resourceful, so I suppose it isn't any surprise that you should appear to have fallen on your feet again.” Professor Endtimes convinced himself, softening a little. “Thank you for bringing me this warning Stunner."
                The Stunner nodded quietly, grateful for the professor’s unusually high propensity for trusting her.
                "So what's the plan?” she asked after a moment of silent staring between the two of them. “Even with the drugging, we still don't have that long before Shedder tells them everything."
                "I’m still unconvinced on that front. None of my captured associates have given me up yet, Stunner.  Why should he be an exception?"
                "Because the others were captured working for you. He was captured trying to turn you in."
                "It sounds to me like he was trying to have you arrested, not me." He said bluntly, taking her off-guard.
                "I mean… he knew a lot about you, and he was going to spill it."
                "And he told you this? Just exposited about his nefarious plot to give you time to stop him? That's a beginner's mistake, and not one that I would expect from someone as experienced and sadistic as Shedder." Professor Endtimes pushed, his suspicions seeming to come into bloom once more.
                "Well, no he didn’t tell me exactly. But he took details of our plans with him when he ran. And the copy of your address that The Chauffeur gave me." The Stunner said shakily. Helena was desperately trying to think of anything she could to give her story some credence.
                The professor's face gradually discovered extra veins buried deep within his flesh and brought them to the surface one-by-one. It turned steadily redder as time went by. Helena wasn't sure if that was just a blood-pressure effect from his primarily cake diet, but suspected that rising anger about potential betrayal might have been a key player too.
                “Then perhaps this is something over which to be concerned.” He said finally. “Luckily enough, I have had the hench-people working hard to get the Super Stunner network rigged into place.”
                “Yes, I saw one of the pylons on the way here; you didn’t tell me about that.” The Stunner said, grasping onto the subject and sounding affronted.
                “I thought it might make a nice surprise for you. One task fewer for you to organise.” He said dismissively, with the tired, almost apologetic sincerity of someone who has had a kind gesture brought into perspective by bad news.
                “Surprise is right. There are still the gaps in the network to consider though, right? We haven’t made all the pylons yet. If the ministry is going to move against you soon then you’ll need to let me help you prepare Operation Fuzzykins before it’s too late.” She pushed, making a move for information whilst his suspicions had been put to bed.
                "The gaps in coverage won't be as much of a problem as you’re expecting." Professor Endtimes countered, ignoring her request for information.
                "What do you mean? Have you got something else in place?"
                "You could say that. I was hoping to make this another little surprise for you when we fired the Super Stunner network, but I fear that events are overtaking us. You see, I was thinking to myself how much of a shame it would be for our weapon to be rendered ineffective by something as silly as poor masonry. My rats, jammed or otherwise, were always able to get into every home; nowhere was safe and nowhere was blind. But rats are unfortunately not sufficiently conductive for our purposes, and we would be back onto our highly contentious point of being able to fire the weapon only once if we tried to use them anyway.
                But they got me thinking of what else can run into every building, and in doing so deliver the Super Stunner. The building's wiring would have too much of an unpredictable loading, and the plumbing was scarcely appropriate with the advent of plastic piping. But then I remembered the telegraph lines, linked in every major government and domestic building to a wireless transmitter, a router or modem if you prefer." His hands were open and moving in wide, expressive sweeps. Although muted by the day’s events, talking about a nefarious plot, especially in the design phase, was getting the professor excited.
                “You want to link the Super Stunner into the phone and broadband network?” The Stunner inferred, horrified. “It would hit everything! The whole city!”
                “Complete effective coverage. The pylons will still do the bulk of the work, but now they can discharge through to almost anywhere.” The professor said with a wide, mischievous grin.
                “Surely there’s no way that could happen within the next few days? It took us long enough to get the basic design sorted.” The Stunner asserted, hoping that saying it would make it true.
                “Ah, that’s the tremendous part of it. It doesn’t require us to do anything at all, Stunner. Did I mention that I have someone on the case already?”
                “Already?!” She exclaimed, providing a sufficient answer to his question by just repeating it back to him.
                “Yes, a long term associate of mine named X-directory. I have him performing the necessary works now. He works quickly and effectively, just like you. It must be something to do with an affinity for electricity and wires. I would anticipate that the network will be connected to the telecoms lines within a couple of hours; he’s even going to connect it to the power grid for us. The Super Stunner network will be live today, well before the ministry has a chance to pump Shedder for information.” He announced proudly, like the parent of a catastrophically dangerous baby.
                Helena felt like her heart had just stopped.
                “Now, I know you must be concerned about having someone else involved here” Professor Endtimes surmised incorrectly from The Stunner’s shock “but I also know that he can be relied upon. He once caused all the phones in the police station to ring at once and remotely increased their volume at the same time! And he was instrumental to the kidnapping of one of the ministry’s agents, in fact; tapped one of the phone lines and got valuable intelligence on how to lure the agent into an ambush.”
                “Impressive.” Came The Stunner’s strained reply, fists clenched at her sides. With a deep breath she forced herself to swallow her rage at the celebration of Agent Katter’s kidnapping. If the network was about to become operational then she needed to press on undistracted, so that she at least stood a chance of stopping it. The more she thought about what the professor had just told her about its expanded capability, the more scared she became.
                “So the Super Stunner network isn’t going to have any blind spots at all?” She asked, her mask of calmness holding back tides of fury from one side and waves of panic from the other. She was expressly trying not to murder anyone or crumble the healthcare service, and all she needed to do was never fire the superweapon she had been trying not to manufacture for Professor Endtimes at all. Since the weapon was almost completed, upgraded from her original design to be able to indiscriminately hit even the infirm, and on the cusp of being unleashed, it seemed that trying to stop something had a strong positive impact on its occurrence.
                “I have requested that he leaves the hospital alone, as per your logic before, but all else will be under our command.” The professor told her. “So let the ministry come for me. They’ll be stopped in their tracks long before they get here, and we shall make good our escape if our location is compromised.”
                Helena wanted to scream. She wanted to grab Professor Endtimes directly by his ‘good’ intentions and shake him until he couldn’t think anymore. She’d been so close to having him, all she should have had to do was keep him distracted until the ministry arrived. But now, if she didn’t do anything about it, they would never be able arrive at all and it would look like their defeat was entirely her doing.
                The day had been a crushing series of disappointments already, so naturally the next step was to realise that there was no time for lunch. Far more critical than having any of the sandwiches that the professor would most certainly have prepared that morning was taking the chance to stop X-directory.
                “If he doesn't know the ministry is coming then he could be in danger. I'll go find him and keep him safe." She blurted, taking the first justification she could think of for leaving.
                “Why would the ministry be coming already?” Endtimes asked urgently.
                “There’s always the outside chance that they managed to purge Shedder’s system or give him an antidote. There’s no saying whether they’ve managed to reverse engineer any of Confectionista’s not-so-sweets yet.”
                “I thought you’d used them as a bullet-proof insurance policy? Why the change of heart?”
                “Because I’m thinking out loud.” The Stunner replied with startling honesty.
                “Hm… you do like to do that from time to time.” Professor Endtimes conceded.
                “Do you know where X-directory is? Can you page him and find out?”
                “I’m afraid not, Stunner. He has flatly refused to take a pager from The Chauffeur every time I’ve tried; says it’s a subversive trinket attempting to invalidate the physical telecommunications infrastructure. He has very strong feelings on matters like that.” Professor Endtimes said with a shrug. “Besides, he also made the point that I was trying to assign a number to someone who was literally ex-directory; the contradiction of theme alone was reason enough not to take one.”
                “Damn it. Fine. Any ideas of where to look?”
                “He was prioritising the area around the police station but that was earlier this morning. I’d suspect he’ll be working his way along the network of junction boxes.” Professor Endtimes replied, not sounding entirely committed to his own answer.
                “Right, OK… OK… Do you have a map of the junction boxes?” The Stunner asked desperately.
                “It’s not something I tend to reference much, to be honest. I’ve always left it to X-directory to worry about those sorts of things.” He answered, with surprising patience at the torrent of questions.
                “I’ll have to find him the normal way then. I just hope I make it in time.” The Stunner said, deflated.
                “Don’t look so worried, Stunner. He’s not going to spoil the Super Stunner Network. In fact, once he’s finished the city will be ours to command!” Professor Endtimes said with an optimistic grandeur as she made for the door. Well-meaning as his words had been, they were exactly why Helena had looked so worried in the first place.
 
                The Stunner ignored the professor's banging front door as she climbed to the roof of his house. If he'd wanted courtesies like a properly closed front door then he shouldn't have hijacked her weapon, nor should he have set a maniacal telecommunications engineer onto the task of making it unnecessarily dangerous. She swung her legs up onto the tiles and leaned against the chimney, working out the best way to find X-directory. He would be working outwards from the station, somewhere he’d attacked before. There was no time to find a map of junction boxes, but she was sure she remembered seeing them all the time, one of those things which is so frequently observed that it’s never noticed.
                Without a solid plan of where to go to, she would simply have to trace a path towards the station and hope for the best. It wasn’t the dead-cert plan she would have liked for such a time-constrained mission, but desperate times called, as ever, for pathetic measures.
                The Stunner bounded along the rooftops, scanning the ground for junction boxes or signs of tampering. Quite what those signs would look like was a mystery, but she assumed that they would be obvious when she saw them. She had been running for twenty minutes, looking uselessly at the ground all the way, when her pager beeped out at her.
                "Contact from X-directory. Station junction box set up. Junction boxes behind university next." The Chauffer sent through. Professor Endtimes must have bought her cover story after all.
                "On the way. Thanks." She sent back.
                She had him now. X-directory's location was in her possession, the final perpetrator of Agent Katter's assault. The Stunner looked down at herself, decked out in the costume of the very people she and Katter were trying to stop. Well, X-directory wasn't going to be given the delusion of villainous rivalry or the honour of a quick stunning. She was going to bring him down as Agent Burnley of the Ministry of Extraordinary Crimes, and he would know the depth of his failures.
                In the seclusion of a wide chimney pot, Helena changed out of the Stunner's costume and into her own clothes. Above the city she stood with a badge in her pocket, revolver in her holster, pager and radio on her belt, and a lust for vengeance or justice, whichever one should come first, in her heart. Helena stuffed her bag, filled with the Stunner's outfit and arsenal, between a pair of chimneys. She wouldn't be using anything Endtimes had provided for this. This was ministry business. This was for Julian.
 
                Fluttering into the midday sky, a flock of pigeons made good their escape from the pavement. Plump bodies and inelegant flapping passed in front of the sun, and long shadows traced over the green painted casing of the grand collection of junction boxes behind the university. Tessellations of green monoliths with peculiar triangular-keyed locks stood like a stone circle, ready for druidic maintenance and arcane rituals to increase their bandwidth. The kind of weeds which grow exclusively out of determination to be a nuisance sprouted from cracks in the paving slabs, and wound their way through the surrounding wire fence. Their spreading leaves attempted in vain to obscure the warning labels adorning the enclosure, advertising various manners in which one might find themselves electrocuted by getting too close.
                Outside of the overgrown haven was parked a white van. False promises of reliable connectivity, high quality landline communications, and reasonable prices adorned it like tribal tattoos. All who cast their gaze upon them knew that such words were strictly ritualistic, but that was often the best chance they had, and so they pinned their hopes on the sacrament of a large 'WOW! LOW PRICES!' contained in an asymmetrical star regardless.
                A cracked, yellow hard hat bobbed around inside the fenced compound, ducking from cabinet to cabinet and checking connections across the woven nests of cables inside. From his waist dangled an array of tools designed to stress and torture electrical cabling and fibre optics alike; stripping them of their insulation, severing ends frayed by time and long service, and fusing lengths of wire together into a Frankenstein's monster of conductive horror. More of their kind lingered in the recesses of his black and yellow tool bag, waiting for their time to be unleashed and delighting in the torment they intended for the world outside.
                Day-dreaming of routers which drop connections and phones which hang up of their own accord, the monster worked on. Countless home networks had fallen victim to his crossed wiring. Whole streets suffered helplessly from tactical disconnections. Phones rang long into the night in empty houses and nuisance calls hung up the moment they were answered, all by his machinations and cruel tastes. X-directory smirked as he pulled another wire from the electrical substation and, with meticulous care, fastened it into place in the junction box. The whole enclosure was turning into a jungle of electrical vines, winding around one another completely unlabelled, and preparing to strike with currents of darkness.
                Agent Burnley felt bare without her cape billowing behind her or the weight of a whip on her thigh. Certainly there was a freedom of movement without a sledgehammer strapped across her back, but she couldn’t completely shake the nagging feeling that she had forgotten something whenever she ran a little more freely than expected. Strange though it was to be without The Stunner’s full arsenal, the feeling of her service revolver in its holster, the police radio on her hip, the handcuffs on her belt, and her face not being constricted by a lump of rubber and leather carried a reassuring familiarity. She was back in the realm of her comfort zone, unambiguously preventing a super-villain from exacting dastardly plans on the innocent people of her city. The feeling was only infinitesimally marred by having created that dastardly plan in the first place, and having sunk a few weeks into making it a reality.
                Vapour trails carrying the stench of solder wormed their way into Helena’s nostrils. Under normal circumstances she would consider anything worming into her nose to be a critically unpleasant invasion of personal space, but this served as a signal; her prey was nearby. She slowed her jog along the quiet access road to a crouched walk, and pressed herself against the concrete wall of the university dormitories. Feeling the rough surface tugging and scratching at her shirt, she took a half step away from it again, since grazing herself would aid neither stealth nor combat prowess.
                At the corner of the building, just beyond the bicycle rack which acted as more of an invitation for theft than a deterrent, judging by the pieces of lock littering the floor, the road opened up into a secluded square. Whoever was in charge of making such decisions had elected that this would be a terrific location for grand collection of junction boxes, which served as a connection for several areas of the city. Unfortunately, that also made it into an El Dorado for X-directory. This incredibly niche circumstance should have been predicted and mitigated, Agent Burnley decided, and therefore she would be investigating and arresting those responsible once she’d dealt with Professor Endtimes.
                Helena leaned out of the corner and saw the top of X-directory’s hard hat disappearing behind a ‘Danger! Electrical Stuff!’ sign. She slid a hand to the revolver on her hip and initiated her approach. Inside that fenced-off enclosure and underneath that hat was the final perpetrator of Agent Katter’s assault and attempted murder, and he had to be brought to justice; painfully, if possible. Soft crunching and scratching sounds from the loose grit under Helena’s boots punctuated every step, the ticking of a clock counting towards X-directory’s downfall. After stepping over a discarded leaflet, an unseen piece of broken glass shattered beneath her weight; it seemed the clock had an alarm.
                Tools clattered to the ground and a flash of yellow hard hat zipped between the weedy foliage creeping up the fence. Barely a second later, as Helena was running for the shelter of X-directory’s van and its misleading offers, four dark, rectangular blocks adorned with soft rubber buttons soared over the fence in quick succession. With a plastic clattering they crunched onto the paving, cracking their outer shells and illuminating LCD display screens with unintelligible error codes. A momentary silence hung the air, anticipating terrible things to come while Agent Burnley tried to duck for cover, before the cheap wireless landline handsets erupted into a cacophony of static, blaring white-noise out into the desolate square. Helena threw her hands up to hear ears, feeling like the notes of electrical horror were piercing directly into her skull.
                From the impenetrable sea of static rose a repetitive, resonant chirp of feedback noise. It crested the surface tentatively at first, like the periscope of a wounded submarine, but soon found its boldness, growing exponentially in volume until the square sounded like the inside of a robot's aviary. Helena was fairly sure her ears would start bleeding at any moment. She was totally deaf to anything X-directory may have been doing, and so intense was the din that it was even starting to distort her vision. Eyes watering, ears screeching and stomach rumbling slightly, Agent Burnley dashed out from behind the van and stamped hard on the nearest handset. With a distorted electrical wail its own guttural song ended, and in doing so it reduced the intensity of the others. But it wasn’t over.
                “You won’t find me in here!” Came a distorted, crackling proclamation, booming over the static from a speaker mounted to the van.  Helena looked up just in time to see an Ochre Pages spinning through the air like a dense, papery discus. With no time to dodge away, the poorly indexed tome of otherwise easily available numbers cannonballed into her hip, tearing one leg out from underneath her. Agent Burnley flipped forwards, catching herself with her hands but landing on several fragments of crushed handset.
                With a pained yelp Agent Burnley snatched her hands away from the phone remnants and rolled over, rubbing at her hip as she scrabbled back to her feet. Shards of plastic, circuit board, and wire skittered away as she lurched her way towards the next handset, before another sturdy stamp dropped the volume level again. The reduction in din returned some of her capacity to think. In an effort to learn lessons quickly she dropped a shoulder and rolled across the pavement, anticipating another phone book assault, but no airborne reference materials assailed her. She looked up to assess the situation, just in time to see a fax machine spin through the air and crash onto the ground after a mercifully poorly aimed launch.
                Rising back up from her impromptu gymnastics and office-equipment near-misses, Helena saw a figure standing in the open gateway of the fenced enclosure, mere feet away from her. The afternoon sunlight glittered around him from his sparkling cape of fibre optics, hanging over his navy overalls as if he were a reflective echidna; Helena couldn’t rule that possibility out just yet, but suspected it wasn’t the case. Tools swayed gently at his belt with electrical gore dripping from their blades and mandibles, principal among them a hot soldering iron, not safely stowed but lingering at temperature as a significant singeing risk. Below his cracked yellow hard hat lay a pair of murky safety goggles, being held in place by one hand in a vast, thick, insulating rubber glove. His yellow and black tool bag was gripped in the other.
                “Agent Burnley! I’ve left several messages for you over the last few weeks but you must have been out. My landline mines seem to have finally got through to you.”
                “How many have you connected?” Helena demanded, rising up from one knee and drawing her revolver.
                “Dial it back there, sweetheart.” X-directory sneered, watching her casually as she levelled her revolver at his legs.
                “How many pylons are wired in? How much of the city is at risk?” She asked again.
                “I’m no answering machine. If you want to make an enquiry you’ll need to dial my direct line.” By the time he’d finished speaking, Helena had fired into his left knee. She was sure she recognised the dull crunching sound the impact made.
                “Endtimes has been wise to that one for months!” X-directory mocked, shaking his knee-pads in a protective taunt and dropping his tool-bag. “Now let’s see how you like my Cat-5 of nine tails!” Rising like a squid from an underwater crevice, a nine tailed whip of cat-5 ethernet cables emerged from among X-directory’s tools as the bag fell from his hand, the whip already secured to his wrist by a re-purposed lanyard. Helena raised an arm and turned her face against the impact as the cable tentacles clawed at her, plastic connectors biting into her flesh and cracking against her body. The pain was immediate and searing, and she reflexively curled her whole torso up as a shield. Another whip-crack fell across Helena’s hunched back, and then another. More and more strikes fell in rapid succession.
                “The police force you have called is unable to withstand this might! You’ll be a message in your defeat!” He bellowed in disdainful parody.
                “You must have got your wires crossed.” Helena growled at him under the rain of blows. “Because you’re going to be X-di-wrecked-ory!”
                “You dare!” he exclaimed in rage, the personal pun catching him off guard and pausing his lashes. Small though it was, the opening was time enough for Helena to regain her composure. She took another pot shot at his legs, but again the kneepads absorbed the impact.
                “Redialling a wrong number won’t help.” X-directory observed, lunging at her gun-arm before she decided to aim somewhere else. Helena was too slow to snatch her hand out of reach, and soon found a thick rubber glove closed like an insulating vice around her wrist.
                “Make this easy on yourself and disconnect the pylons.” She told him, staring directly into his eyes with a dark, stony expression.
                “You expect me to hang up on my life’s call? I’m otherwise engaged with Professor Endtimes, the greatest connection anyone can make!” He shouted in Agent Burnley’s face, pulling his whip arm back for another strike. With her own free hand Helena grabbed at X-directory’s wrist, leaving them locked in grapple for dominance.
                “He’ll use you up and leave you to rot! Be the one the put the phone down on him and we’ll be lenient.” Helena promised insincerely. He’d lost any privilege of leniency when he’d helped to kidnap Agent Katter.
                “I’ll be off the hook as soon as I’m done with you, little girl. I’ve lived through lines worse than this.” He said dismissively as they tussled for control. “I remember being a simple telecoms engineer working for the city, installing phone systems, checking junction boxes, and most importantly ensuring that absolutely nobody received the internet speeds for which they had paid, even if their connections were perfectly capable. Life was as unrewarding as it was simple.” Despite relaying a monologue, X-directory was unyielding as he fought against Helena’s grip on his wrist. Rubber soled boots skidded and ground against the pavement as the two combatants pushed against one another, shaking the long fibres of his cape into pendulous waves of motion.
                "But one day, at the end of a hard shift installing low quality hardware at an office building in the central business district, I took a radioactive phone call on a line I'd just installed. No more was I content to always be the messenger, breaking my back to allow everyone else their freedom of information. No, I had become something more! I could feel the pulse of telegraph lines, taste the modulation of electrical signals, and see along lengths of fibre optic cable. From that day on I melted away from plain sight and took on a new life in the shadows. I became X-directory! Networks tremble at my name, phonelines cut out at my presence, and fibre optics thicken into opaque horror at my sight!" Behind X-directory’s eyes was the light of mania, as well as the usual optic nerve, brain, and so forth. Revulsion and fear found themselves as bedfellows in Helena’s mind; he was stronger than her, gradually winning their battle for control, and certainly an utter cretin. Fast action was required.
                “You’re disconnected.”  Agent Burnley snarled. Letting go of X-directory’s whip hand she snatched up the soldering iron from his tool-belt and slammed the glowing hot tip into his hip in a single stabbing motion. He yelped with pain and doubled over as the iron sizzled against him, smoke rising as his overalls melted, but still his grip stayed strong. Dropping the soldering iron, Helena grasped a fistful of strands from X-directory’s cape and wrapped them around his neck with startling efficiency.
                “Youhhhhrrgghh.” He protested, but Helena was in no mood to show compassion. Frantically X-directory tried to whip at her, but she had pulled herself too close to his body to get a good swing in. Her legs were braced against his own, preventing him from kicking out at her, and her bodyweight was leant fully on the improvised garrotte. Between that and the grip he had maintained on her wrist, The Stunner lifted herself clear off the ground on a throttling rope of fibre optics. Glassy strands were slowly disappearing into the flesh of his neck as the pressure mounted. Reds and purples grew in intensity across his face, clashing with the navy of his overalls, but all thoughts of colour co-ordination were drowned out by desperation for air.
                Helena hunkered into X-directory, pulling down hard on his cape and tucking herself out of harm’s way while the Cat-5 of nine tails flailed around her. He was being stubborn, not letting go of her gun arm or falling down, but she could wait him out. After what he’d orchestrated for Katter, this fate would be a mercy.
                Heaving chokes tried to force their way up X-directory’s throat but nothing could breach the dam Agent Burnley had made of his neck. Blackness started to fade in across his vision and the static wail from the remaining landline mines started to dull.
                Concrete rushed up to meet Helena’s Burnley has X-directory let his grip drop. She, however, indulged in no such courtesies, maintaining the pressure on his cape as he toppled. Immediately the deranged telecoms engineer collapsed forwards to the ground on top of her, barely maintaining a hold on consciousness, with both hands scratching at his neck. Helena wiggled her way free and finally let the cape go as she clambered to her feet.
                With deep, hungry gasps X-directory swallowed air back into his cramping lungs, and with eyes still wide with panic he stared blankly into the sky. He was only faintly aware of the darkened world around him. There was a sound like something scraping against the floor, the sound of Velcro tearing, and some kind of movement around his legs.
                “You’re going to get up slowly, walk to that junction box, and disconnect the pylons.” Agent Burnley instructed through panting breaths, making confident use of the future tense.
                “Please hang up and try again, sweetheart.” X-directory wheezed, wasting what little breath he had on being snarky.
                “I won’t ask you again.”
                “I didn’t catch that. Please repeat it after the tone!” he shouted with sudden and surprising vigour for a recently choked man. His right hand moved sharply towards where his whip had fallen, but he found nothing underneath his fingers.
                “Wrong area code, caller.” Agent Burnley said drily, before firing a single bullet into his left knee.
                “AARGH!” he screamed, showing just how much air he’d managed to claw back into his body. Agent Burnley was impressed with his lung capacity despite all that had gone on.
                “Well now I guess you’re going to have to crawl back to the junction box and disconnect the pylons.” She revised emotionlessly. It was an astute observation. Hopping was unlikely to be the chosen method of ambulation; even if he managed to stand unaided, the repeated impacts would only jar his wound, and the pain would send him back to the floor. “Shame Endtimes didn’t pre-empt me being able to undo Velcro, isn’t it?” she said with a sneer, holding up two bullet proof knee pads which were no longer at their designated posts.
                “You’re a digit short of a full number!” X-directory accused wildly with a voice strained by shock and pain, but he immediately made a move to obey her instructions. Feeling charitable at his show of willing, Helena took a grip on the back of his collar and helped to drag him over to the junction box.
                X-directory worked frustratingly slowly, but Helena supposed that she was partly to blame for that. Asphyxiation and gunshot wounds were famously inhibitive to this kind of dextrous manual task. Still, she carefully watched exactly what he was doing, and to what he had chosen to do it. Eventually, having left a bloodied trail around the enclosure, The Super Stunner network had been disconnected from that particular collection of junction boxes. Helena cursed every second X-directory had wasted in undoing his work, but at least it was completed.
                “How many others have you wired up?” She demanded of X-directory, lying in his own bloodied smear on the ground.
                “Only one more. By the station.”
                “Only one? You’ve been out here all day.” She barked with mistrust.
                “I had a lunch break, sue me.” He spat back defiantly, with the work ethic of a true field engineer.
                Counting her blessings that the work-shy spirit hadn’t left X-directory in villainy, Helena plotted the fastest route over the rooftops to the station. No matter which path she took it would be too long; she needed to finish up and get back to Endtimes’ lair with all the haste she could, so that she could keep the professor distracted and help gather the evidence. But then she had another idea.
                “Give me your keys.” She commanded X-directory.
                “You really think I’m going to drive away like this?”
                “Dangerous criminals do dangerous things. Keys!”
                Removing one thick red glove to reveal a hand which was equal parts sweaty and hairy, he reached into the chest pocket of his overalls and produced a set of heavy steel keys. His throw was poor, sending the keys a clear foot to one side of Helena.
                “Your van is being impounded as evidence, but I need to borrow it first. Someone needs to fix the damage you’ve done.” She told him, for no good reason.
                “What? You’re just leaving me here?” he cried, sounding worried and cheated.
                “The ministry will be along to pick you up.” She said nonchalantly as she walked towards his van.
                “That’s it?” he asked for confirmation.
                “Now that you mention it, there is one more thing, actually.” Helena said sweetly, stepping back over to him. “This is for Agent Katter." She raised her revolver, let her smile drop, and then fired at his other knee.
 
                Helena had wasted enough time. In fact, she suspected that she may well have wasted too much time, and without even having to try. Overachieving on that point was rather counterproductive in the current circumstances. She thought about her situation and concluded that if she set the ministry on Endtimes now then it would be possible, although not easy, to get the Super Stunner disconnected from the remaining broadband lines before the professor realised what was going on with X-directory. Only the patchy network would remain to stop the assault, and she hoped with all of her being that it would be patchy enough.
                Sitting in the cab of X-directory’s van and shaking, Helena raised the radio from her belt to her mouth and depressed the speaker button.
                “This is Agent Helena Burnley. You need to strike at Professor Endtimes now! Number ninety-six Simpatico Way. Get him before he can escape, damn it!”
                There was silence, the kind of tense silence which fills a noisy room and drowns out all the sound when someone announces they have ‘something important to say’. It was louder than any sound a person could make and nothing could be heard over it. That is, until orders were barked back for unit after unit to mobilise and surround Endtimes’ lair. It wasn’t going to be an arrest; this was an assault. But once the operational commands had been given there was still another instruction.
                “And bring me Burnley. She’s out there somewhere and I want her under control NOW. She owes us some answers.”
                It was unmistakably General Montsourcil. When he’d been demanding surrender from The Stunner his voice had possessed a commanding anger and derision; he’d looked down on her and wanted to remove her from his world. But now, giving the order for Helena to be brought in, it was colder and somehow more spiteful. It spoke of betrayal; she was in the ministry and should have been one of his own, but she had gone AWOL immediately. It didn’t matter that she’d not met him, of course. He had taken control of her department and therefore she owed him her loyalty, and her absence was not to be taken lightly.
                Helena could only imagine what life must have been like for Commissioner Harmon and the other agents over the preceding few weeks. None of them had given her up, at least, not sufficiently for her to be hunted and captured, and judging by Montsourcil’s tone he had definitely been asking about her. Between that and trying to shoot Agent Porter in the chest with stun darts that morning, she probably owed them all at least a box of biscuits. Perhaps a cake too.
                Before that, though, she owed them all safety from the Super Stunner network.
 
                Echoes bounced off the high-rise buildings of the city centre. They ricocheted from window to wall to rooftop, using any surface as a springboard to be heard and stay relevant, much like the pop music artists of any older generation. Similarly, the new sounds quickly drowned the dull reflections out, using the same sounds but playing in slightly different places. Regardless of age and origin, the sirens successfully brimmed the cityscape and left no-one in doubt that the ministry was moving in force, and not at all by accident. Laser-blue lights flashed brightly even in daylight, and somehow ensured the safety of other motorists by blinding them before they could get out of the way. Such were the ways of the ministry, and no-one questioned them, although this was helped by the fact that these police vehicles were flanked by several trucks, jeeps and half-tracks in military livery. The aggressive sounding of a car hooter felt somehow futile against several automatic weapons.
                Against the flow of urgent emergency vehicles, and lost among the afternoon traffic, was a white van smothered in price and performance promises it had no intention of delivering. Time was a precious resource not to be wasted, and in her temporal poverty Agent Burnley drove like a woman possessed, lurching in and out of her own lane, overtaking wherever she could, cutting other drivers up, and treating the speed limit as a recommended minimum. Every manoeuvre she made threw her heart up into her mouth, but somehow among the squealing brakes and melodious hooters of other vehicles she came out unscathed every time. She was sure that her actions would make a target of herself but, given that she was driving a white van, nobody thought that anything was out of the ordinary.
                "Team A closing in on the target. Parking is a nightmare, repeat, parking is a nightmare. Suggest next road over or using park and ride, over." Her radio spurted at her. The ministry had progressed even more quickly than she’d thought.
                "Any good pasta places nearby, over?" Another voice enquired with priorities all of its own.
                "Silence on this channel! Team A and myself only, over!" Montsourcil chastised.
                A bright red light ahead was merely a suggestion to stop now, and Helena stamped hard on her accelerator, scraping between the lanes of cowardly traffic and pushing her way to the ‘stop’ line. Along the street to the right somewhere was a junction box, rigged up to the Super Stunner network, and it currently posed the greatest risk that the ministry had ever known. Bravely, Helena tore through the lights and span the wheel hard to the right, sending her van sliding across the tarmac and depositing a black trail of melted rubber in her wake. As the nose of her van crested the opposite lane, however, Agent Burnley caught sight of a jet black streak barrelling along the carriageway. She forced the brake pedal down so hard that it lifted her from the seat and catapulted her forwards into the steering wheel, an enduring honk ringing out as her weight was supported by it. The black streak, on the other hand, showed no inclination towards decelerating. It swerved around the front of the van with reckless abandon, mounting the pavement and smashing through a roadside charity stand. Unfazed, the car bounced back onto the tarmac and, within a few seconds, was gone.
                Taking a second to soothe her heart, check for more traffic, and block out the jeers from the vehicles she herself had jostled past, Agent Burnley restarted her stalled engine and pulled away.
 
                Drips of pedestrian foot traffic weaved around the junction box. Occasionally someone would cast a curious glance over the tangle of cables jutting out of it, which were clearly not supposed to be there, but no-one touched a thing. Electrical safety guidelines were far reaching indeed.
                X-directory's van came in at full speed, hazard lights providing an insufficient warning of the degree to which Helena's driving was hazardous. With a bang she mounted the kerb, suspension bouncing up and down and throwing loose tools around in the back with a series of expensive sounding crashes. A telegraph pole helped her to reach a complete stop.
                Dazed from the passionate nature of her journey, Agent Burnley staggered out of the van on jelly legs and made the fastest progress she could over to the junction box. How Agent Carmichael managed to do this every time was a mystery to Helena.
                “Stand back! Emergency works!" she shouted to no-one in particular, cementing a bulletproof cover story for her tampering with network infrastructure.
                Her radio was still blurting urgently at her hip, The Stunner's pager was singing the song of its people, and Helena was feeling rushed. Using her set of stolen keys Helena unlocked the junction box and stared at the spaghetti of wires inside. So poor was X-directory’s cable discipline, or perhaps so good was his deliberate poorness, that there was no way of tracing the malicious cabling from one end to the other. She recognised a few of the same features that X-directory had picked apart earlier on, but there was no way she had time to sift through everything here and deconstruct it properly.
                With a heavy sigh, Agent Burnley stepped back from the junction box. Tipping her head from one side to the other she weighed up every option she could think of to resolve this situation, considering time requirements, collateral damage, public reaction, and even tax-deductibility. A clear winner arose.
                "At the door. Doorbell looks old and unpleasant, over." Team A’s spokesperson informed her over the radio. Time was growing ever more critical.
                Helena lifted one booted foot up to waist height and drove it violently into the rack of wires and connections. Plastic housing split apart and wires cracked under her sole, doubly so when she pulled it free again for another strike. Yet more junctions burst open as leather met circuitry. Over and over with the mad energy of a woman rushed, Agent Burnley drove her sole into the junction box, until all that remained were the splintered remnants of a circuit board and several dangling cables. In one last act of maintenance, Helena grasped a handful of cables and tore them free from what remained of the junction boxes interior.
                Around her, the pedestrian traffic looked on with vague interest. Their collective opinion was one of uncertainty; none of them ever recalled telecoms engineers working so much with their feet, nor did they find the sea of plastic chippings cascading from the junction box to be familiar. On the other hand, the junction box doors were generally locked shut, so no-one really knew what went on inside and nobody wanted to risk making a fool of themselves by questioning it. Helena was acutely aware, however, that they had been looking on. She needed to keep her white-hot cover story burning.
                “There we go, that ought to do it for another 6 months.” She said to the crowd. Several rapid and suddenly knowledgeable nods corroborated her hypothesis. Someone muttered to their companion that they, personally, would do it every 3 months just to make sure, and that in their experience a 6-monthly cycle was a little infrequent, but no-one questioned her openly.
                Uncontested, Helena turned to get back in X-directory’s van, but astutely observed that her assisted stop had come at a price. An economically unsound price. Namely, that the telegraph pole which had been employed as a buffer was now the best part of a foot inside the van’s bonnet, with twisted panel work and distressed engine parts accessorising its periphery. Her hopes that it would start again, let alone drive her to Professor Endtimes’ lair in good time, were optimistic to say the least.
                “Breaching the door in five… four… three… two…” The officer on the radio declared. ‘One’ came with a loud bang followed by silence. They were inside. Hoping to gain some intelligence on what was going on from the other side of the door, Helena checked her pager. A string of messages from The Chauffeur awaited her.
                "Stunner. Have you found X-directory and secured the network?"
                "Stunner. Respond."
                "Stunner, what's going on?"
                “Do we have full coverage? We’re worried about you.”
                “Ministry inbound. Take care. Meet at FoodHouse on Weir Road if able.”
                In a perverse way, guilt started to billow up from the pit of Helena’s stomach. The aim had always been to bring down Professor Endtimes and anyone working for his network, but seeing them worry over her safety whilst she was betraying them felt like hot knives slipping into her. The Chauffeur had looked after her all along and was doing so still. He was complicit in goodness-only-knew what criminal activity from his time with the professor, but that did little to make Helena feel better when he had done her no wrong, even in his suspicion of her earlier that day. At least she could argue a good case for him after the arrests. That is, she could if her word still counted for anything.
                Wanted though she was, she knew where to find the evidence of Endtimes’ crimes at his lair. If she could get in there then the ministry would at least have to let her explain or show them where it was. Without X-directory’s van or The Chauffeur it would be a long run back to the professor’s house, but also a necessary one. Whatever happened afterwards was future-Helena’s problem, and she would hopefully be in a position to be able to deal with it.
                Jingling keys landed in the passenger foot-well of X-directory’s van while its indicators flashed, signalling that the locks had engaged. Moments later they were sealed inside as the door slammed shut. Although guilty of nothing themselves, they would have to go down with the ship like any good captain; the police would eventually tow X-directory’s van away, but for now it could lay in state, steaming slightly against the lamppost which had wrought its downfall. Growing smaller in the distance was the last master the van had served, making a desperate dash towards a terraced house which was awfully popular all of a sudden.
 
                "Kitchen clear. Smells delicious. Suspect an improvised baked product in the oven zone." Helena’s radio buzzed as she sprinted through the streets, weaving between the afternoon pedestrians.
                "Roger, Captain Tranch. A pastry chef will be sent to investigate." General Montsourcil confirmed.
                More silence, amid the pounding of Helena’s feet, the chattering of the crowd, and the background noise of traffic. In all honesty, it was nothing like silence at all, but carried about as much useful information.
                "Upstairs clear. Decor poor. Carpet losing pile depth, over.”
                “Move on." The general instructed.
                "Bathroom cleaned regularly, toilet bleached, no scum in the shower.  This guy was good." Came the next report a minute or so later.
                "He certainly kept his nose clean, yes."
                No-one answered. It was suspiciously like a pun, but no-one dared to call General Montsourcil out on that kind of thing. The radio-silence lasted for another minute.
                "Living room empty, sir."
                "Keep searching."
                “Aye, sir.”
                After a few minutes of silence from the radio, The Stunner’s pager beeped at her once more. She hoped with all her heart that it was an SOS from the basement.
                “Are you safe? Ministry have moved in force. Stay out of danger.”
                Another crushing weight of guilt was piled onto Helena’s shoulders. She put the pager away again, trying not to think about it, and kept running.
                “It’s empty, over.” The team radioed-in again, with an air of finality. Helena’s run slowed to a walk.
                “Living room, under the disgusting rug,” She panted back as abruptly as possible. There would be no mistaking what she was talking about.
                “Basement has already been swept. It is also empty, over.” The words hit Helena like a sack full of over-ripe oranges. How could it be empty? It was the promised land of maniacal villainy.
                “There must be something! It was all there a few hours ago!” She insisted.
                “Negative. It’s a bust. No evidence, no trail to follow, and no sign of anyone. Burnley’s intel was old, over.”
                Helena stood still, staring blankly into her radio. Endtimes had made it out; she’d been too slow. Even without the Super Stunner network he had been one step ahead of the ministry and cleared out his lair. The now familiar tsunami of hopeless panic rushed over Helena, dragging her under the waters of desolation. After everything Helena had done to get here, Professor Endtimes still held all the cards and made the ministry look foolish. And this strike against him wouldn’t go unpunished; he’d been worried about the scale of ministry involvement before, but this was something else. It would push him into unleashing Operation Fuzzykins, whatever that was, and there was no-one there to stop him. No-one except her.
 
                Stashed away on the rooftops, right where she’d left it, was The Stunner’s outfit. With a heavy heart she pulled the rubber and leather ensemble back onto her body, feeling it cling to her like a prison of shame. Shaking with reluctance and disgust at having to continue serving Endtimes, just when she thought she’d been freed, The Stunner re-fastened her electric arsenal about her person, and paged The Chauffeur back.
                “Was tied up with the ministry. Things are bad out here. Currently at Willow Street.”
                She only hoped that her silence hadn’t been too long. Thirty seconds later, her pager beeped back at her.
                “On the way.”
                ‘Always ready for me.’ Helena thought. ‘I’ll never get away.’
 
                Tyres crackled over grit in the road, and The Stunner looked up to see The Chauffeur’s battered black limousine, retrieved from the safe garage, approaching along the street. The exertion of the overly long day was catching up to her, stiffening her muscles, slowing her movements, and amplifying her stomach’s protestations over the lack of desserts.
                “Where’s X-directory?” The Chauffeur shouted out of the window as he approached.
                “You tell me. I thought he was with you. I couldn’t find him.” The Stunner shouted back, jogging towards the car.
                The Chauffeur pulled the rear door directly up to her and she got in without waiting for him to walk around and take her bag. As she fastened her seatbelt she saw him staring at her in the rear-view mirror. His eyes were narrowed, studying her face while wearing fatigue and anguish on his own.
                “Professor Endtimes will be very interested in finding out what happened today, ma’am.” He said finally as he pulled away, diving straight into business.
                “Him and I both.”
                “Shedder betrays us out of nowhere, you tell us that he’s silenced, and then all of a sudden the ministry launches a daylight charge at his lair.” The Chauffeur thought out loud, sounding more accusative than The Stunner liked.
                “They must have found a way to nullify Confectionista’s drugs, then. They’ve been exposed them before, so their lab techs must have reverse engineered her formula.”
                “And they found such conviction in the words of a drugged villain, pumped full of an experimental antidote, that they sent the whole city’s law enforcement plus a sizeable chunk of the military after us immediately?” The Chauffeur countered with obvious disbelief.
                “The mayor declared war on Professor Endtimes, Chauffeur, and he’s a maniac. He was going to execute Windy Bill for stealing a bathtub for goodness sake.”
                “And Shedder offered up all this information after hiding out in garden sheds for months, staking out the station for Agent Burnley, resisting arrest, and then being rescued by the very person he’s apparently trying to sell out?” Anger was creeping through The Chauffeur’s voice like poison ivy through a flowerbed.
                “You saw for yourself how much he was spoiling for a fight with us during the rescue. He’d already cracked. I bet he was at the station trying to find a way of sneaking a message to Burnley without being immediately arrested.” The Stunner argued back.
                “Not picking a fight with ‘us’, Stunner. Picking a fight with you. I don’t think he trusted you.”
                “Then he’s a lunatic. Literally the only contact we’d ever had was me saving him from the army.” She protested.
                “Doesn’t it sound like a bit much of coincidence to you, ma’am? You were with Shedder just before he was captured, and no-one else heard him plotting to overthrow the professor except you. All we know is that he didn’t like you, and that he was in a position to have stolen incriminating details about you. Your typical style is to fight your way out not flee anyway, so it’s highly suspicious that Shedder couldn’t be brought back to us. Unless, of course, you didn’t try to bring him back, because you didn’t want him spilling your secrets to us.” He said, sounding like a certain bilious Belgian detective trying to unspool a murder case.
                “Endtimes doesn’t deal in names. If Shedder gave him mine then it would put us both in danger.”
                “You were supposed to be helping X-directory all this time as well,” The Chauffeur continued, ignoring her “and now you claim you never found him despite being told where he was. And it’s not like you to wait around without taking action, so how did X-directory manage to evade your grasp so completely? Two hours to search for a few junction boxes sounds like plenty of time to me. You could easily have found him. And where is he now? Why did our contact drop after you started searching for him, hmm?”
                The Chauffeur swerved unnecessarily hard around a bend, throwing The Stunner to one side.
                “He wasn’t where he should have been and the ministry is on the warpath! I couldn’t exactly move with impunity to find him or stop for a chat! They must have got to him.”
                “And there’s another thing. Shedder raised a very good point yesterday about your reluctance to engage the ministry. You saved that agent’s life when I was about to have him. Windy Bill says you did the same with the mayor during the bathtub heist, and you stopped Confectionista from melting Securi-T’s legs. I granted that the latter would have been messy, but you’re awfully squeamish when it comes to finishing a job, aren’t you? You have preached to Confectionista and the others about not escalating the engagement to keep us all safe, but was that actually just to protect your friends in the ministry?” He said, venom saturating every word as he formed conclusions in his mind.
                “I don’t have ‘friends’ in the ministry!”
                “Really? See, I said ‘think’ earlier, but Shedder outright told me he didn’t trust you. When we were discussing plans for the jailbreak with Endtimes he got me thinking about why Agent Burnley hadn’t been seen at the station in such a long time. She must have gone away somewhere very suddenly. So I had a think about the dates and realised that you’d been with our organisation for the whole time that Shedder had been staking out the ministry. A little longer in fact.”
                “You know why I joined when I did as well as I do, and it wasn’t because I’d managed to take down Burnley.”
                The Chauffeur burst into laughter.
                “Wonderful try, Stunner, but you can’t fool me anymore. I was looking at photos of Agent Burnley today. After what Shedder said, and the date of her disappearance and your arrival lining up, it made me curious.”
                His eyes were locked on hers via the rear view mirror, and therefore not on the road ahead. It was a testament to powers beyond Helena’s comprehension that they were yet to crash.
                “I don’t like what you’re saying, Chauffeur.” She stated redundantly. In hear heart of hearts she knew that she wasn’t supposed to like it.
                “How could the ministry possibly have got so much information out of Shedder so quickly? You gave him everything you had from Confectionista which, by my reckoning, would leave him incoherent for hours. You yourself said that was the intention. Antidote or none he wouldn’t be talking that quickly. But perhaps he didn’t tell them anything. Perhaps he’s still incoherent. And when he wakes up perhaps he still won’t be trying to sell the professor to the ministry for his own freedom, because he never was doing that, was he ma’am? He was trying to warn us. He was trying to tell anyone who would listen that The Stunner is Agent Helena Burnley.” The Chauffeur’s voice dropped a whole octave and lost even the veneer of aloof professionalism. With a dramatic clunking sound the rear doors locked.
                “Bullcrap! You’re wrong.” The Stunner cried desperately, still trying to convince him of the innocence she didn’t have.
                “I’m quite correct, and Professor Endtimes will be most interested to find out why his home has been attacked when he hears that someone he had welcomed into his house has betrayed him. He fed you. He paid you. He helped you!” Disconcerting levels of rage were creeping into The Chauffeur’s voice, sounding entirely unnatural next to his usual calm professionalism.
                “You’ve got it wrong, Chauffeur!”
                “I’ll not hear any more of your lies.” He said coldly. “It’s ironic; although I’ve chauffeured you around all this time, it was you who drove me to this.” With another switch flick a mirrored divider rose from the bulkhead separating the front seats from the rear. The Stunner unfastened her seatbelt and lunged at the gap, but it was shut tight before she reached it.
                Her cover was blown. Helena had been worried about how astute The Chauffeur was for a while, and now he’d finally figured her out. Having taken very few measures to mitigate against his observational skills, that wasn’t terribly surprising. The one saving grace was that, from the sounds of it, he hadn’t yet told the professor of his suspicions or revelations. Maybe he was trying to confirm the facts before taking his suspicions higher, or perhaps he’d just not been able to get in contact yet. As soon as they got to wherever it was they were going, however, she’d be done for. She needed help.
                Helena snatched her police radio from the bag.
                “This is Agent Burnley. Black limousine travelling along Highknee Boulevard, heading north. Professor Endtimes’ right hand man is on board, and will lead you to wherever the professor has fled to. I am on board too, repeat, I have been captured.” She said rapidly.
                Helena jammed the radio back into her bag and stole furtive glances out of the windows and the rear of the limo. Experience told her that these windows wouldn’t break when slammed into a solid brick barbeque pit, so it was unlikely that she would be able to smash them out, but they at least provided her with an idea of what was going on. The Chauffeur’s partition was sound-proofing his cab from her, although she wondered if he had a microphone rigged up to the back of the car. Part of her wished she’d thought of that before using the radio, but most of her was beyond concern.
                Buildings were blurring past her outside, and Helena tried to use them to get a handle on where they could possibly be heading. The safe-garage was in this rough direction, but the roads being taken weren’t the most efficient way to get there. Nothing had come through on the radio about road blocks being completed, so it didn’t seem likely that the best routes had been obstructed, either. That either meant that they were heading somewhere else, or that The Chauffeur had lost his sense of direction, possibly letting fall out of his pocket in one of the sharp bends he’d been taking.
                Rolling and sliding around in the back, The Stunner searched for a way to release the locks or retract the divider. Although it is considered to be poor prison design to include a method of egress on the interior, Professor Endtimes was probably caring enough to include an emergency safety feature. At least, Helena hoped he was. Nothing obvious was springing out at her, however.
                As the minutes passed, Helena’s searching became more desperate. The Chauffeur’s leather seats found themselves torn open by The Stunner’s belt buckle, but only foam padding and sealed housings were hidden within. Turning instead to the doors, The Stunner crushed the faux-wood panelling with her battery hammer, but the locking mechanisms had been isolated from the inside of the car, presenting her with nothing but bare metal. With every blow The Chauffeur was forced to frantically correct for the violent swaying of the rear of the vehicle. He had no idea what The Stunner was up to, but seriously suspected that she was bowling anvils around in the back. Regardless, he had faith that the rear of his limo was a fortress; there was no way she could break out.
                After ten minutes of frantic vandalism, all that The Stunner had achieved was making her own journey less comfortable. She waded around the rear of the limousine in an ankle-high lake of leather shreds, foam, and plastic trim fragments, and was about to sit on her now entirely un-padded seat when a bright blue and red reflection caught her eye.
                She span around, whacking her knee into the hard exposed metal of the seat, and saw a squad of police cars tearing along the road behind the limousine for the second time that day. Helena had seen this play out after freeing Shedder, and suddenly remembered that all manner of traps and tools had been mounted onto the limo. After radioing for the whole ministry to assault an empty terraced house, Helena didn’t think her heart could take ordering a squad of police cars into an ambush by limo detritus. As the chase continued, however, Helena saw no stingers deployed or nails scattered across the tarmac. Perhaps The Chauffeur hadn’t been able to re-supply since this morning. Hopefully he didn’t have something worse up his sleeve.
                Another flashing joined the red and blue. It was a bright white, flickering and varying in intensity, but always building. Helena pressed her face to the windows of the limo but there was nothing in her field of view. Whatever it was causing the white light, it was high above them and farther along the road. It would come into view soon, she knew. Anxiously she struggled to see whatever it was, but conversely The Chauffeur seemed unperturbed, judging by his driving. It wasn’t calm by any stretch of the imagination, but that was his general style. The speed limit was a challenge, lane markings were meaningless paint on the road, and traffic lights were simply there to control other people. Nothing was different after the arrival of a mysterious white light.
                The Stunner slid around on her metal bench as The Chauffeur found countless turns on a straight road, but kept her focus on the white flashing. It couldn’t be far now, judging by how bright the flashes were getting, rivalling even the police lights for sheer luminesce. It was a sign-post which finally caught her attention. Carron Street.
                Helena knew it from somewhere. The junction of Carron Street and Leafield Road. Above a branch of ‘Mrs Nasher’s Haberdasher’s’. Just to the right of the chimney. Bolted into the walls.
                Mrs Nasher’s came into view, and just to the right of the chimney was a makeshift pylon of twisted metal with coils around an iron core, the whole thing bearing an uncanny resemblance to the mast which had been stolen from Freedom Pirate Radio some weeks before. The only dissimilarity was that the radio mast wasn’t usually cloaked in a glow of white light, with sparks and discharges of lightning building up around it.
                The Chauffeur’s black limousine shot past Mrs Nasher’s. And then the Super Stunner fired.
                Everything outside the limo turned to bright white in a sustained lightning flash, and Helena’s radio exploded into horrifying white noise, far below the volume of X-directory’s landline mines but somehow more harrowing; it was as if the radio system was actually screaming at her.
                Of course, once the white noise died down, it genuinely was screaming. Dozens of voices had somehow managed to depress the transmit button on their radios to alert their colleagues to the significant quantities of vocalised displeasure going on. All across the city teams of ministry officers hunting Endtimes were writhing on the floor due to electric shocks being administered from on high. Despite Helena’s efforts, the station was a hubbub of burned out electricals and unconscious officers, some of whom were suffering the indignity of a shock whilst eating or trying to subtly steal stationery from the supply cupboard. Military vehicles crashed into one another or into the structures around them, taken from full pursuit to incapacitation in a matter of seconds. Shoppers were thrown to the ground among their spurious purchases, crushing yoghurts and delicate new work blouses alike. Dental work took a turn for the unorthodox, talk-radio broadcasts remained equally tedious in static and silence, and the queue at M. Bezler’s Bank was infused with an energy never-before-seen in the branch, outside of criminal activity. A gentleman in a flat dropped his piping hot tomato soup onto the new sofa, but that was unrelated to the Super Stunner; he’d just neglected to use a tray or tea-towel to insulate himself.
                In the wake of the Super Stunner network’s discharge, there was a jerky and prone chaos of shocked civilians everywhere. In the rear of The Chauffeur’s limo, there was a cavernous abyss of regret, and wishes that things could be undone. Professor Endtimes had found a way to power up the network even without X-directory or The Stunner getting involved.
                Interspersed among the screeches from the radio were urgently shouting voices demanding answers to all sorts of relevant and reasonable questions. Most of them centred on the motivation behind all the screaming business going on, which must understandably have caused some confusion to those in the blind spots of the network. Some of them were status requests to ascertain who was still capable of taking action. A couple were urgent enquiries regarding whether or not the pasta had survived.
                Agent Burnley stared in open-mouthed horror at the squad cars which had been pursuing her. They had swerved wildly when the Super Stunner fired, crashing variously into each other, the surrounding parked cars, and the street lighting. She hoped with all of her being that the officers inside were unharmed, and cursed internally that the same hadn’t happened to The Chauffeur’s limo. Quite why they had escaped unharmed she didn’t know, but Professor Endtimes certainly would. And he’d probably try to explain it to her in painful detail over a whole twenty-four hour period, given the chance.
                Panicked radio chatter morphed quickly into new orders. The pursuit of Professor Endtimes and Helena Burnley was to be abandoned, and all able personnel were to start triage duties. With a casualty list potentially covering the whole city, they had bigger problems to solve. Helena wished that she had made the same decision a few times over the course of her undercover operation, but now she was stuck. The ministry would not give chase any longer. She was alone, and about to be delivered to her ruination.
                Movement along the road caught Helena’s attention from behind the wrecked squad cars. A black vehicle with blue and red lights behind the radiator grill jumped, by means entirely unknown to Helena, clear over the obstructive police vehicles and crashed down to the pavement behind, giving determined and distinctly un-stunned chase behind. It was the same black vehicle which had shot past her van earlier, in fact.
                The Chauffeur had also noticed his pursuer, resuming his defensive driving techniques which appeared, to an outsider, to be the most aggressive manner of driving possible. He swerved into a narrow side road without slowing, weaved between parked cars as if they were slalom gates, and made no attempt to respect Keep Clear markings. Helena stared desperately out of the rear window, but the black car was nowhere to be seen. Whether it had crashed into one of the parked vehicles or simply missed the turn she didn’t know, but it was gone. Triumphantly the limousine re-emerged onto a main road, and as if by magic, the black car was back behind them, blasting through a row of bicycles in a rack.
                The Chauffeur’s driving was reckless, like a racer using public roads, but the black car was something else. It had managed to catch up with someone who was already pushing the limits of dangerous driving, even despite the carnage of the Super Stunner, and seemed intent on catching the limousine whatever the cost. All over the road it swerved, as if furiously driving around every regulation in the Highway Code; it was almost out of control but just barely held together. To call the driver an animal would be to insult the survival instincts of every creature Helena had ever witnessed. It was feral, it was rabid, it was single-minded, and Helena only knew one person like that.
                Through the tinted black windows The Stunner was entirely invisible to her pursuers, but Helena could see all too clearly that Lisa Carmichael was on their tail. She simply didn’t comprehend anything like danger when soaring through the air or careening towards an obstacle; it was all in pursuit of the next victim of her justice, and Helena was terrified that the name of that victim was her own. Like every other order to stand down she’d ever received, Agent Carmichael had ignored it and continued the chase, and it made Helena want to simultaneously hug Lisa and cry for her own life. She wasn’t alone just yet, but perhaps she’d have been better off that way.
                Despite having heard them lock, and knowing full well that the car was travelling at an alarming speed, Helena still tried the doors. As is typical of locked doors, attempts to open them proved futile. Under normal circumstances this would be to the benefit of her own safety, since she wouldn’t fall out of the car and roll underneath the wheels of the pursuing vehicle, but given that the pursuer was Agent Carmichael, staying inside the car could still end up far worse.
                Crashing into the seats like waves assaulting the shore, a tide of cushion and door-trim wreckage threatened to swallow The Stunner. Alongside the remnants of her seat’s padding, she tumbled into the side of the limo as The Chauffeur took a sharp corner at speeds which would have earned at least a minor fault on his driving test. The fact that he’d also mounted the pavement to do so wouldn’t have gone down well either. Helena looked out of the back window and saw that, naturally, Agent Carmichael had no qualms about following suit. She even seemed to swerve out of her way a little bit to knock over an A-frame billboard.
                Having observed that everything not nailed down to the limo was doing its best to travel at high velocity, including Agent Carmichael, Helena sought to perform some tactical denial of movement rights. Grabbing the battery hammer quickly, she jammed it as best she could into the door gap between the rear and side seats. If her hammer got too carried away in its flight and came to greet her unannounced, then all her hard work to bring down Endtimes would be rendered strictly academic.
                Somehow, despite The Chauffeur’s persistent ‘pedal to the metal’ philosophy, the limousine still had more speed left to offer, and Helena felt the whole vehicle lurch underneath her. Fastening a seatbelt around herself was getting progressively more tempting with each impact she made against the chassis of the vehicle, but after the lockdown she had no trust in the belt releasing a second time. Whether or not that made travelling loose in the rear a sensible move was an entirely separate question, and one to which she wasn’t going to commit enough time to reach an answer.
                The Chauffeur and his pursuer blitzed through partially formed road blocks of stunned police, a mid-construction checkpoint of military personnel lying unconscious, and a high street of shoppers lying among strewn goods and dropped ice creams. It was a showcase of the tangible damage done by The Stunner's abstract idea for a super weapon, a sobering reminder that she should have been trying to stop this, not help it. Helena wondered whether, had she been in Lisa’s position, she too would have gone feral. Whatever the answer, she was sure that she would have still taken steps to avoid crushing fallen equipment on the road, and in that manner she was still quite unlike Lisa.
                Knowing that nothing was going to stop the chase at this stage, Helena’s thoughts returned to escaping her lockdown. Against the tidal forces of The Chauffeur’s swerving and accelerating, The Stunner swam through the carnage in the back to reach the divider. It was the last place to check for a way to disengage the lockdown, and if she was going to get the upper hand on The Chauffeur then she needed to get out of the vehicle on her own terms, preferably before they reached Professor Endtimes. Agent Carmichael’s influence on that eventuality was difficult to determine. Her antics could equally assist Helena in defeating The Chauffeur or consign The Stunner to a devastating pummelling; there would be no way of telling until it had already happened, as was often the way with Lisa.
                Another corner threw The Stunner onto the side-seating, the metal promising her a rainbow of bruises across her lower body. She pushed herself up on tired arms only to find herself suddenly airborne as the whole limo turned underneath her with a crunching impact. Helena surmised from her new set of future-bruises that Lisa had taken rather less care about slowing for the corner, electing to ram the limo instead. Wisely, The Stunner chose to stay down as the limo sped away again, straightening itself out and accelerating away with even more aggression than before. She couldn’t see his face, but Helena was beginning to think that The Chauffeur was getting worried.
                Once she felt reasonably sure that another ramming wasn’t imminent from Agent Carmichael, The Stunner pulled herself over to the divider and started examining everything in the vicinity. This time she had one arm wrapped around the seatbelt to prevent another unintended flight across the interior of the vehicle, a move which somewhat inhibited her mobility but drastically reduced her fear. Even if finding a release mechanism this way took the whole journey to wherever it was they were going, it was still better than punishing her already traumatised body any further.
                After several minutes of examination, including a couple of visits to the floor of the limo thanks to the slack in the seat belts, The Stunner had found nothing obvious to help her deactivate the lockdown. The rear of The Chauffeur’s limousine was a prison from the inside and, given how much punishment it had taken from Agent Carmichael, a fortress from the outside. As far as she could tell, the only way to control the lockdown was via the power button in the front with The Chauffeur. What she had learned during her search, however was that Endtimes had made sure that the Super Stunner would re-fire deliberately. Twice more he had unleashed waves of electrical incapacitation on the city, covering himself from any organised pursuit and encouraging further blaring from the radio, but she and Agent Carmichael were now outside of the network’s radius. It would do nothing to slow Lisa down.
                Looking out of the window and trying to ignore the radio noise, Helena saw that they had joined the motorway. It was busy, thanks to the evening traffic, but The Chauffeur could apparently always see enough clear road to force his car through. From the sounds outside it seemed that no-one else was a fan of this, but they were positively in love with it compared to Agent Carmichael’s chasing efforts.
                Every time there was enough space clear to overtake, The Chauffeur would swing hard in front of Agent Carmichael to prevent her from getting past. In response to this, Lisa made the move of never so much as touching her brakes, instead pummelling the rear of the limo in order to slow herself down. Thinking about The Chauffeur having a power button for the divider had given The Stunner an idea, but Helena decided that it would have to wait until the situation was a little less perilous.
                Another blow landed against the bumper with a crunch, jolting The Stunner off-balance and vindicating Helena’s decision. The Chauffeur kept up with his snaking, blocking Agent Carmichael's route to overtake every time and therefore continuing the extreme punishment of his rear-end. Helena didn't dare to think about how much damage Lisa's car was taking or how long it would keep running. At this stage the emergence of a fireball behind the limo wouldn't come as much of a surprise.
                Turning almost ninety degrees across two lanes, The Chauffeur cannonballed his limo onto an exit slip road, covered in the ground-down and annihilated wreckage of some optimistically placed bright orange barriers. Helena had seen these surroundings enough to recognise them; they were back at the Frederick Montgomery Memorial Airport. Safety be damned she had to get the divider up immediately.
                Releasing her grip on the seat belt, The Stunner allowed herself to drift to the back of the limo, sustaining only minor bruising and bumping along the way. Her battery hammer had, to its credit, been well behaved and stayed largely in place. It had even gone so far as to act as a role model, with other elements of the car's vandalised interior wedged in around it. Some moderate tussling and tugging allowed the battery head to scrape free of the body work, and once again The Stunner took herself for an unsteady walk up to the divider.
                She had never noticed that the wide, sweeping turn towards the airport banked steeply to the inside of the bend before. When wading along a limousine at high speeds, however, the gradient of that bend felt significantly more pronounced. At least having a battery-hammer walking-cane mitigated some of the difficulty. Once The Stunner was far enough up, she pressed the end of the hammer onto the divider and leaned as much of her weight as she could forwards to try and stay balanced. Making sure she was standing on as much plastic and leather trim as possible, The Stunner drew a deep breath and discharged the hammer head.
                Sparks and crackles burst from the battery, spreading outwards like webs and waves. The interior lights which were inlaid around the seating and ceiling started to flash and flicker, and small smoking patches emerged along the tracks of the wiring. Faintly she heard electrical motors start to spin, and daylight filled the limo alongside a torrent of high speed air as the windows wound themselves down. Several cup holders emerged from between the seats, and a TV screen descended from the ceiling. A loud clunk signalled the release of the door locks, followed by another flood of light as all four of the doors popped open. Helena was somewhat terrified that the car's reaction to electrical failure was to open everything up, even at full speed, but then considered that being irreversibly locked inside wouldn't have been much fun either. Venting the contents of the vehicle onto the road was then, somehow, the lesser of two evils.
                A mechanical whine accompanied the divider as it started a slow and jerky descent. Before it was even a hand’s width open, however, another series of sparking sounds erupted from the motors and the divider ground to a halt. The Stunner released the power switch on the handle of her hammer and the crackling faded through a quiet fizzing into silence.
                Helena caught The Chauffeur’s shocked eyes in the rear view mirror and heard him pressing wildly at the buttons on his dashboard, but nothing else happened. She had completely fried the limo’s electrical systems from within, having delivered the damage that the Super Stunner couldn’t. The Chauffeur was about to say something, probably something rather impolite, when another crash from behind knocked The Stunner off balance. She, her hammer, and most of the car’s interior trim slid backwards to the rear of the limo, delivering her back to her bag of equipment and the hurricane of winds trying to tear her out of the vehicle. Foam, shredded leather, and shattered plastic were littering the road behind them in a bow wave of fly-tipping which even Windy Bill would have respected.
                Taking the now heavily-trafficked hole in the fence to get onto the runway, The Chauffeur’s limousine bounced along the grass unpredictably. Every time the car bounced it levered up around the front axle, sending the rear high into the air before crashing it back down to the earth in an indefensible abuse of suspension. The impacts shook The Stunner around mercilessly as she tried to sling her bag over her shoulders and pull the strap tight, but after a lot of heartache and undignified staggering she managed to secure it to her body. With her battery hammer fixed securely in position on her back, and her sense of self-preservation put on hold for the time being, The Stunner crawled her way to the limo’s rear passenger-side door and peered out.
                Gales of wind determinedly pulled outwards at The Stunner, and the bouncing chassis seemed to have similar ideas regarding her expulsion. Placing a hand on either side of the open doorway, The Stunner leaned her head out just in time to see the runway looming ahead of the limousine. Another hard judder shook the limo as it mounted the tarmac, and all of a sudden the ride was smooth again. The scraping and crunching of a second car crashing onto the runway behind her promised to end that smoothness awfully soon.
                A short way ahead on the runway was a deep green cargo plane, presumably belonging to Professor Endtimes. The Professor's cargo plane had a strange combination of jet engines and propellers, which Helena was sure had been hand selected for the most appropriately criminal aesthetic rather than any functional reasons. It was considerable in size and looked like it may have been liberated from a military compound rather than procured on the open market, but for the most part it was just an aeroplane.
                What actually was remarkable about his plane was that it was moving.  This wasn't a surprising revelation in and of itself since planes are designed to move; very fast, in fact. A plane which doesn't move is simply an awkwardly proportioned shed. However, the motion of this particular plane was of note because The Chauffeur, and by extension the Stunner, were still planning on boarding it. Until this point of her life Helena had only ever boarded planes whilst they were static, largely because a plane in motion had the two distinct advantages of being able to move much faster than Helena could run, and be much higher than she could reach. Statistically, if a plane was moving then Agent Burnley was quite incapable of boarding it. But this time, in a move reserved for action heroes and the criminally insane, Professor Endtimes was forcing them to jump into it from a moving car. It seemed that The Chauffeur harboured similar shock and concern at this revelation, uttering several of the same choice phrases with which he’d tried to berate The Stunner moments before.
                Seeing the limo doors hanging open seemed to spur Agent Carmichael into a frenzied rage, or at least more of one than she was usually in; the doors were a new, softer target which she could assault and deal some damage to. Helena barely heard Lisa's furious acceleration in time, throwing herself backwards as the black car's bonnet sheared the rear passenger door clean off. Grinding metal sounds permeated the limousine as Lisa pushed the severed door along on her bonnet, carving a gouge through the limo's side panels as it went. Another shaking impact told of the end of the front passenger door too.
                Carmichael shot past the front of the limo, depositing broken doors on the runway as she went, and slammed on her brakes, swerving across the limo to form a road block. The Chauffeur, however, was too quick for that; braking hard and making a few lurching, gut-wrenching turns of his own he dodged around Lisa and resumed his pursuit of the plane. For her own part, Helena was surprised by just how long this runway was, being able to sustain a car chase of this length. It spoke of either wasted real estate or regular enough car chases behind moving planes to warrant the airport being specifically designed around it. Either way, decisions like those were a glimpse into why it had gone out of business.
                Pushing the limo flat-out, The Chauffeur had all but caught up with the plane. Roaring aeroplane engines berated Helena with backdraft as she tried to lean out of the limo, the wing extending directly in front of them and the body of the plane over on the driver’s side. Unfortunately, also on the driver’s side, a jet black ministry car was busily tearing off the few doors which remained on the limousine. Lisa had wasted no time in resuming the chase when her blockade had failed, and now she was directly between the limousine and Professor Endtimes' plane. Helena could see the side loading door open, ready to receive her and The Chauffeur, and continued trying not to believe what she was about to do.
                Lisa made another attempt at emergency-stopping in front of The Chauffeur, intent on making the plan work, but he was too twitchy and slipped past the rear of her car to sidle up closer to the accelerating plane. The gap had closed most of the way, but The Chauffeur wasn’t pulling any further up; only the driver’s door was level with the opening in the plane. He was planning to escape himself and leave The Stunner to her fate with the ministry.
                The Stunner knew what she had to do. The only way she could stop Endtimes was to get on that plane, and she had to do so before The Chauffeur revealed her double-identity. Unfortunately, the single path she had to boarding the plane involved turning an already suicidal manoeuvre into bare-faced lunacy. Reminding herself that she was dressed in rubber and leather, and had recently burgled a bath, assaulted a telecoms engineer, and used a stolen can-opener to humiliate a career-criminal in home-made body armour, Helena concluded that lunacy was all this operation had ever offered.
                Distorted, crackling voices still emanated from her waist, urgently organising medical support for thousands of injured people across the city. As much as Helena thought she deserved the reminder, her radio could go no further with her; it would raise too many suspicions if someone else on the plane saw it. The Stunner snatched it up from her belt and dropped it into the rear of the limousine. Perhaps one of the ministry officers would find it among the wreckage and realise that it meant she had really been in the limo. Maybe they’d use that information as a reason to give chase, or maybe General Montsourcil would use it as an evidence that she was a traitor. It didn’t really matter anymore.
                Holding her breath for want of anything else to do with it, Helena gripped the top of the door frame, stood on the edge of the chassis, and leaned out backwards. The force from the engines was even more intense farther outside of the limo, buffeting her backwards and testing her grip, but there was no time to hesitate. With an awkward bunny-hop she vaulted onto the roof of the limo, lying flat against it as the thin metal bowed under her weight, and started to belly-crawl towards the front.
                Like a decade old memory of an embarrassing conversation, Agent Carmichael once again returned unwanted, the strained engine of her miraculously still-running car just about audible once it was flanking the limousine. Lisa had seen The Stunner’s death defying antics and refused to be outdone.
                Pressing on against the wind from the speed of the limo and the backdraft from the engines, The Stunner pulled herself level with the opening in the plane. Standing at the edge was Windy Bill, apparently perfectly at home with the draft from the engines, secured to the interior of the plane with some kind of thin chain. When he saw The Stunner he leaned forwards, said something that she couldn’t hear, and extended both hands to catch her. They didn’t look like the actions of someone who knew she was a traitor; it was a helping hand for a colleague. Good enough.
                Helena tried to push up to her knees against the clawing winds, when the limo bowed down towards the passenger side and started to snake backwards and forwards in tight zig-zags along the runway, throwing away any balance she had. It felt as though The Chauffeur was losing control, and The Stunner was struck by the fear that he might be able to jump out before her, leaving her to drift uncontrollably on the roof of a limo pursued by the spirit of rage itself. She stole a glance towards Lisa’s car and found it falling behind, gradually listing away to one side and distinctly bereft of a driver. The shaking underneath her continued, and The Stunner started to wish that The Chauffeur had jumped out after all. Lisa, in a move of equal parts daring, stupidity, and spite in the face of good sense, had made the daring leap from her own car into The Chauffeur’s passenger seat.  Agent Carmichael was in the limo and The Chauffeur was trapped with her.
                Jerkily the limousine made its way back to the plane, bashing into the hull repeatedly as The Chauffeur struggled to maintain control. The Stunner could only imagine what was going on in that cab, but suspected that her imagination wasn’t nearly primal enough to get to truth of the situation. Whatever happened, she knew The Chauffeur wouldn’t last forever in there.
                Two feet isn’t a great distance. Most people jump farther than that by accident when they see an unexpected spider, or an expected spider in an unexpected location. Bars of chocolate which are longer than that are eaten in a single sitting. But when those two feet separate a snaking limousine from a speeding plane, with rushing tarmac underneath, it feels markedly farther. Such was The Stunner’s opinion when looking towards Windy Bill’s outstretched arms and encouraging grimace. No stranger to ignoring the rational voice of fear, she curled her legs up underneath her, braced on her toes, lifted her arms, closed her eyes, and jumped.
                In an underwhelming instant The Stunner felt Windy Bills’ arms grab her, wrapping under her armpits and around her back. More easily than hefting his wind-gun, he pulled her into the plane and deposited her on the floor, giving her an ‘Are you OK?’ raise of the eyebrow and a concerned grimace. The Stunner nodded back hurriedly, and then turned back towards the limo and The Chauffeur’s plight. He might have been trying to expose her to Professor Endtimes, but this was the man who had saved her from Jellin’s Park pond, put her to bed, chaperoned her faithfully for weeks, and helped her to keep Professor Endtimes on side. He was undoubtedly a dangerous criminal but he wasn’t an evil person. She couldn’t just abandon him with that animal.
                Without skipping a beat, The Stunner grabbed onto Windy Bill’s arm, making him grunt with the sudden strain, and leaned back out of the plane, forming a human chain to reach out the hand of salvation to The Chauffeur.
                How he was still managing to keep the car going was a mystery to everyone. He had one arm attempting to both ward off Lisa’s flurry of hammer-blows and fumble at his seatbelt clip, and the other on the wheel trying to stay in position. His left leg was raised up and pressing back against Lisa’s chest to stop her getting any closer, whilst the other was leaning on the accelerator.
                The Stunner pulled at Windy Bill and stretched as far as she could, her fingertips falling just short of the limo’s roof. Only another inch and she could grab him. If she saved him then maybe he’d disregard his suspicions of her duplicity, despite the perfect logic he’d employed to form them.
                The Chauffeur’s seatbelt snapped back away from his clip and he was free. He turned his gaze towards the plane and visibly flinched when he saw The Stunner’s hand outstretched in front of him. The thoughts racing through his mind were perfectly visible on his face, weighing up all the possible implications and outcomes of what he was seeing. He could yell out now and tell everyone her secret, but even if it was audible over the engines it would probably mean she would retract her helping hand. It took less than a second to draw a conclusion; he slapped on the cruise control, let go of the wheel, and grabbed The Stunner’s wrist with both hands.
                He had only hesitated for a moment, but it was enough. Lisa had experienced a flash of genius that Helena would never have thought possible; she saw through the red mist, through the fog of berserk rage which surrounded her seemingly at all times, and made the conscious decision to handcuff her wrist and The Chauffeur’s ankle together.
                The Stunner grasped her fingers around one of The Chauffeur’s wrists as best she could and pulled back, Windy Bill doing the same. Lisa and The Chauffeur slid briefly against the leather seats, but jolted to a stop as Lisa braced herself against the driver’s seat. Panicked kicking could do nothing against either the steel grip of the cuffs or the inch-thick skull of Lisa Carmichael. He may as well have been kicking a granite wall for all she cared, but her grip against the seat was starting to fail. Powerful as she was, Windy Bill and The Stunner together were overcoming her resistance, and The Chauffeur was gradually creeping out of the limo. Helena was going to save him.
                But Lisa’s moment of clarity wasn’t over, and she pulled down hard on one side of the steering wheel.
                The force of the turning car snapped back like a bungie line, and The Chauffeur’s hands were ripped free from The Stunner’s grip. He lurched down and away as the limo sped off across runway.
                “No!” The Stunner tried to shout, but it was lost in the noise of engines and rushing air. Windy Bill pulled her back inside.
                Roger Toilet drew the doors shut at a muffled shout from Professor Endtimes, casting the interior of the plane into a dusky shadow. Engine noise whined several octaves higher and The Stunner was staggered backwards into the row of padded seats at the rear of the plane. Turning to face the inside of the plane for the first time, she saw Confectionista strapping herself into one of a row of seats along the rear of the plane. Roger Toilet and Windy Bill did the same. No-one spoke.             
                Forcing The Stunner into her seat, the plane continued to accelerate and eventually pulled upwards from the ground. In muted, numb melancholy, the remnants of Professor Endtimes’ organisation left The Frederick Montgomery Memorial Airport to initiate Operation Fuzzykins, without The Chauffeur. Helena could only hope that the ministry would know where to find her.