“Shut it off!” Anya said as she hauled Immonen up with her. She was hesitant to touch the doctor at first, for fear of him grabbing her and screwing with her like he had before. She took of his coat, tore it to shreds, and wrapped his hands, neck, and lower face with the scraps, then tied his wrists and ankles together as well. It wasn't perfect but it would work long enough to get him to the back seat of the V-200.

“No dice. It's in full-on self-destruct. The core's been totally overloaded past the point of cooling it down. Damn thing had me totally scramble the system too," Gary said as he stumbled to another control panel, still obviously very woozy from whatever Omega-via-Immonen had done to him. "We got maybe five minutes to get outta here before we're toast."

“Shit,” Anya said.

“Well, four minutes and thirty seconds now.”

Anya threw Immonen over her shoulder. “The power you’re using to run this place, it has to be immense. A self-destruct would probably wipe out a chunk of the state, right?”

“No. Implosion,” Gary said. “I was able to check on that much. The reactor's gone critical and it would take out a sizable piece of Illinois, which is why I made the self-destruct have a failsafe if the reactor passed a certain point. It'll suck the immediate area out of existence but leave everything else untouched."

"Thank God for small favors," Anya said. While she was relieved innocent people wouldn't be harmed, imploding didn't sound fun. Gary was still wobbling around on his feet, so she grabbed him around the waist and flew all of them to the hangar as fast as she could. Gary grunted, but didn't protest at the rough handling.

They arrived in the hangar moments later, and Gary limped over to the DragonDrones and other droids that were charging. He began to manually type something into each one’s access panel, and they began to take off. Anya set Immonen into the V-200’s backseat and then hurried over to Gary.

“Damn thing sealed all the exits,” Gary said as he read one of the displays on the DragonDrones, and gestured up at the sealed hangar doors. “Think you could do something about that? These guys will be online in a second to help.”

“It’s made of metal. Don’t you have some kinda metal shaping skill?” Anya asked.

“I do but it more about combining things than molding them. I could make a hole up there but it’d take…hell, more time than we got. Can you blast it open or not?”

“I got it,” Anya said. She directed a beam of light-enhanced fire up at the thick doors and growled as it struck. The metal plating glowed with heat, but didn’t melt right away.

“You had to make this shit really heavy-duty, huh?” Anya asked.

“More about keeping these things out than keeping us in,” Gary replied. "Can you do it? We got a little more than two minutes.”

“I have to do it,” Anya said and increased the heat and fire and light directed at the thick doors. The glow of the metal intensified, turned white-hot, and after another few seconds, finally began to drip down in hissing globs to the floor below.

That was close enough for Anya.

She flew up, and slammed her fists into the glowing hot indent she had made in the metal surface. She increased the heat and focus more, now that she was safely away from Gary and wouldn’t risk igniting him.

“Reggie!” Anya shouted and the feathered serpent appeared, saw what she was doing, and immediately began helping. He soaked up the ambient heat and grew, then breathed his own flames at the metal.

Anya hammered her fists at the hangar doors. The metal dented outward, softened by the heat enough to finally start bending to her will. Daylight streamed down n the hangar and Anya continued striking at the hangar with fire and fury, beating it back and turning it to slag.

“Ninety seconds!” Gary yelled as he continued to manually program the DragonDrones. A few of them fired concentrated beams of heat at the spot Anya was attacking and further melting the door. Anya and Reggie (who was now longer than a limousine), had widened the hole enough to fit Gary’s truck through, and maybe the DragonDrones if they held their wings in during launch. Anya took a few precious seconds to widen the hole as much as she could, then landed next to Gary.

“Good boy, Reggie,” Anya said, then turned to Gary as he kept activating more of the DragonDrones. “Isn’t there some way to do this remotely?”

“Yeah and I checked and it’s all fouled up too,” Gary said, then whistled and the drones all hovered into the air and launched out the hole Anya had made. They fit, but only just. There were still quite a few of the drones stuck motionless in their charging bays.

“Gary, we need to get out of here,” Anya said. “You can make drones again. C’mon.”

“I got time to launch three more,” he said. “Then I’m hauling ass in my truck. You and the doc go.”

“Not without you.”

“Dammit, kid,” Gary said, then ran for his truck. Anya broke for the V-200 and didn’t bother strapping in. She had Reggie shrink down and wind himself protectively around Immonen since she didn’t have time to strap the doctor in properly.

“Twenty seconds,” Gary said as his face appeared in her comms window. His truck blasted up and out the tiny hole and Anya followed close behind.

“We made it!” Anya said as they soared up and out.

“Yeah…shit,” Gary said. There was a massive sucking sound below them and Anya glanced out her window to see the ground collapsing inward. It wasn’t just an implosion, it was like a tiny black hole, sucking up everything of the factory in a sphere below the ground. It only took a matter of seconds, and when it was done, nothing of Gary’s factory remained but a huge bowl-shaped crater that could have held several shopping malls within it.

“You okay, Gary?” Anya asked.

“It’s just stuff, kid,” Gary said. “Granted it was my stuff and it took a shitload of time and RAC to make and I’m mad as hell, but we’re alive.”

“Yeah,” Anya said. “You can rebuild it.”

“I can,” Gary said, “but if Omega wanted to shut it down, then it makes me think we may not have enough time for that to happen.”

They returned to the containment facility in the Mojave. After Gary’s factory, it was their best option. It wasn’t connected to the factory in any way, meaning that whatever Omega did to the factory’s system, the containment facility wasn’t affected. While the facility had been built purely for the purpose of holding the captured alien, it still had a few basic amenities: medical area, living quarters, droid recharging bay, hangar, and scanning rooms. All of the facilities were a fraction of the size and versatility of their factory counterparts, but again, it was their best option.

Gary solved the problem of sending remote signals to the droids in the short flight down, and had them all on high alert status with additional protections in place to save them from being corrupted or hacked. When they landed in the containment facility’s hangar, he gave Anya a half-hearted thumbs-up.

“No damage beyond the factory. I was a little concerned that thing might’ve had me override my boys’ basic routines, but they just kept doing whatever they had been doing,” he said.

“So no hacked murder bots on the loose,” Anya said and let out a breath. Her strength had fully returned, and she now carried Immonen in her arms like an over-sized baby.

“No. There’s hard programming baked into every droid. If they ever receive a command to kill or harm any non-alien creature, they self-destruct. Full shut down, their CPU melts, and they turn into scrap on the spot.”

“You’re sure?” Anya asked.

“Yeah, but I’m running diagnostics on every single droid out in the field right now. Just gonna take a while since I can’t use all the computers at the factory any more,” Gary said and sighed.

“How many droids do you have?”

“Couple hundred construction units, maybe about the same medical drones, three hundred Exterminators, and about twenty DragonDrones. Some minor servitor bots and camera drones, but they’re not worth much. Only two anti-matter bombs, and they’re both located here, as a failsafe in case the alien ever got loose. Which I guess it kinda did, little bastard."

“That’s not entirely true,” Felix said in Anya’s ear.

“Come out out and speak up, Felix,” Anya said and her AI appeared between her and Gary.

“Sorry your cool factory got sucked into nothingness, Gary!” Felix said.

“Yeah you sound really busted up about it,” he replied and his mustache spread out and down as he grimaced.

“I’m crying on the inside!”

“Say what you told me, Felix, please,” Anya said and rolled her eyes.

“Right! The alien that you had contained her was 100% dead! I detected the loss of its signal and the transfer of its data. It was dead.”

“Then how the hell did it allow Omega to maintain control of the doctor?” Gary asked.

“I don’t have the details on what technique the aliens used to maintain control of Immonen,” Felix continued, “but I can confirm that it was very dead before you left. There were no other signals present on the planet Earth at the time, either, based on the data stream it left that I’ve just finished decoding. It was the only alien. I didn’t pick up any signals from Dr. Immonen after the contact either.”

“But Omega took him over,” Anya said and she turned and began walking toward the medical bay. She sensed Immonen’s heat, his steadily beating heart, the flow of his blood. He was alive, and stable. He could have just been sleeping, but Anya had no way of knowing if some other thing was happening to him internally beyond what her heat sense could detect. Gary followed her and Felix floated in front.

“If I had to guess, I would say Omega did so remotely,” Felix said. “I don’t know how, but it would explain how it was using him but not emitting a signal.”

“If it took him over it could do the same to any of us,” Gary said. “If it had happened to you, kid, we’d be in real trouble.”

“God,” Anya said as she entered the medical bay. It was only slightly bigger than the average living room, with a pair of beds, a single, small scanning table, and a few cabinets full of emergency medical supplies from the RAC store. Anya placed Immonen on the scanning table and stepped back while Gary began to activate it.

“I was too busy fixing my connection to my boys in the field to contact the other hosts,” Gary said. “Did you tell them?”

Anya swore. “No. I was too worried about Garreth. I’ll let Sam know. I think that’s how Chain of Command works.”

“Get Chell down here while you’re at it,” Gary said. “Looking at Doc’s brain…something’s amiss there.”

“Shit,” Anya said then called Samaira.

“Anya, hello,” Samaira said.

“Captain,” Anya replied. “We’ve got a problem.”

Anya gave Samaira a quick rundown of what had happened, and the other woman’s eyes widened as she went on.

“Thank goodness everybody’s alive,” Samaira said. “Still, the factory was one of our biggest assets. All right, I’ll let MacDougal and the Joint Chiefs know, and contact the other lead hosts in their regions. Are you all safe now?”

“I think so,” Anya said. “Garreth is still getting scanned, and we’re in the Mojave facility. I don’t know if Omega can take over anybody or if that was a one time thing. Though since only Garreth got targeted, I’m thinking it’s the latter.”

“I agree, but until we’re sure, don’t let your guard down. I don’t know how anybody is supposed to defend against whatever Omega did, but just…stay on your toes. I’ll let you know what’s going on after I talk to the director. Stay safe,” Samaira said, then closed her window.

Anya called Chell next and gave her the rundown as well.

“Holy crap,” Chell said, and the young Korean woman’s face was slack with fear. “It took him over?”

“Something like that. Gary says something is wrong with his brain. Can you get here and give his a psychic once-over?”

“Yeah! I’m already in California. It’ll only take me a few minutes to get there!” Chell said and hung up.

“Is he stable, at least?” Anya asked.

“Physically, yes,” Gary replied as he studied the scans. “Mentally, hard to say. He’s not quite sleeping but he isn’t entirely awake either. I’m gonna call Yai and see if she can come and heal him. I’m hesitant to do anything but keep him stable for now, but with her and Chell here, we should be able to figure something out. Meanwhile, I’m gonna get on securing all my droids and planning another factory. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say Omega targeting my pride and joy wasn’t a random choice.”

“No shit,” Anya said. “I’ll stay with Garreth.”

“Lemme know if you need anything, kid,” Gary said and left her alone with Immonen. Anya frowned and gently ran her hand over Immonen’s forehead, brushing aside a few stray blond hairs.

For now, all she could do was wait.