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Chapter 28 – ExcursionOne of the four men — two of the men were just insanely good-looking, and this was the taller one — said, “That’s all we needed. Stand down, soldiers.”
The two ‘bad guys’ shrugged out of their coats, revealing that both were draped in about a hundred pounds of fancy technology.
The ‘lightning blaster’ said, “Thank you, sir. This stuff is starting to heat up pretty bad. I think I’ve got some burns on my back and shoulders.”
The ‘telekinesis guy’ said, “I don’t think we could’ve faked the force field with someone this close, anyway.”
The two really handsome guys stepped toward her. The taller one, who was in an Army Ranger uniform and looked like he’d be Mister Iowa if there was a Mister America pageant, said, “Good afternoon, Terawatt. I’m really sorry for this deception, but we represent the U.S. Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security, and we’re hoping you would be willing to talk to us for a bit about your powers and your goals. And we’d prefer it if you would take a short trip with us so you could tell our boss in person.”
The bank guard near her said, “I’m sorry about this, Terawatt, but they’re U.S. government, and the bank officers asked us to cooperate with them.”
The still-tall-but-not-as-tall-as-Mister-Iowa one gave her a big smile. He was in an Army Ranger uniform, too. She didn’t know what their ranks were, but she was pretty sure Sam was higher ranked than them, and she was a major.
Mister Iowa gave her a million dollar smile and said, “Terawatt, I’m sorry to pull this ruse to get you here, but your government needs to talk to you for a little bit. If you could come with us for a few hours, we’d really appreciate it.” He gave her the kind of smile that probably made girls swoon wherever he went. “I’m Captain Riley Finn, U.S. Army Rangers, and this is Lieutenant Graham Miller, and we’re with a classified group that could really use your help.”
Okay, he was hot. Totally hot. Hot enough for her to make a ginormous fool of herself if he was maybe six years younger. Okay, he was hot enough for her to make a ginormous fool over, period. The lieutenant, too. Lieutenant Miller had this whole ‘twinkle in the eye’ thing that was so massively sexy. Had someone turned off the air conditioning in the bank? Because she was totally feeling the heat.
Focus, girl! You’re Terawatt, not flaky little Alex! She cleared her throat and in her best Terawatt tones, she asked, “Where would we be going?”
Captain Finn smiled. “Roswell, New Mexico. We have a base there.”
Well, that didn’t sound good. But if they were doing something bad, wouldn’t they have a better line than that? She reminded herself that she was letting these guys’ sheer hotness sway her, when she needed to be playing this a lot smarter. She gave them a big smile back, but she told them, “I’m not really interested in being turned into a lab rat.”
Captain Finn said, “No, ma’am. We just want an interview with you, and some idea of what you can do. We have a vehicle waiting to take us to a jet, and we can be there in no time.”
Even though the captain and the lieutenant were just smoking hot, she really didn’t want to go with them. But a lot more, she really didn’t want the U.S. Army to launch a massive assault on Paradise Valley to find her and track her down. She thought for a second and said, “I have to make a phone call and alert my support staff.”
They both gave her those sexy smiles and said, “That’s fine.”
She didn’t tell them, but she had already pushed the speed dial button when she took the phone out of her glove. Her mom had sewn a little elastic pouch into the inside of her left glove, so she didn’t have to worry about the phone ever slipping out. And she didn’t want these guys to realize it took her maybe fifteen seconds to get through all of Willow’s secret phone phreaker systems before she had a connection.
She also wasn’t going to tell them that Willow had hacked her phone so she could take photos silently. She got snapshots of Captain Finn and Lieutenant Miller and the sergeants who played the supervillains, and a couple of the other soldiers.
She pretended to press a button and wait a few seconds. She said, “Terawatt here. The Defense Department wants me to go meet with them.” She forwarded all the pics. “I’ve got Captain Riley Finn and Lieutenant Graham Miller, both in Army Ranger uniforms, and they have a team of about twelve here, along with cooperation from the local police and the bank.”
Willow’s AutoTuned voice came to her ear. “And they let you make a phone call?”
She explained, “They’re asking nicely. For now. But I’m not interested in finding out what happens if I say ‘no, thank you’. They say we’re going to drive over to a fast jet and fly down to Roswell to a military base, just for a little interview and maybe see what I can do. I should be back before too long.”
Willow said, “Okay, I got everything. I’ll do a little research.”
Alex hung up and slid her phone back into its little pocket. She faced Riley Finn and said, “Do you have a way out of here past all the newspeople?”
He grinned. “We did think about it ahead of time.”
She walked with Finn and Miller through the back rooms of the bank and out the back door, which was covered by a small tent that was also hiding a dusty gray SUV with tinted windows and some stickers that made it look like it was a ‘soccer mom’ car and the mom had kids who went to Paradise Valley schools. She wondered if they had borrowed it from someone local, or if maybe it was the driver’s car and he was one of the soldiers at Camp Atron. She let Miller open the side door for her, and she floated up into the middle left seat. Miller took the middle right seat, while Finn took the shotgun seat.
The driver slipped out through a couple of alleys and drove down east out of town. Once he got on the state roads it didn’t take any time to drive east out to Camp Atron, the military base on the east side of the valley. The base was unfortunately named for the Atron family, too. Well, she was just lucky she wasn’t living in a town called Atron Valley, since the Atron family had once owned most of the area before they lost most of their money, starting with bad stuff in the Great Depression and then continuing over the years, with some of the big problems happening in the last several decades. Alex wondered if that was where Danielle Atron got her self-centered nature and her greed and her sense of entitlement.
They drove straight to a gate into the military base. The driver lowered his window, showed the guard his passes, and the guard let them through without even checking on anyone else. That had to mean these guys had majorly high-level clearances. They drove right out onto the tarmac, where there was a little Cessna jet waiting for them. Okay, she only knew it was a Cessna because it said ‘CESSNA’ on the side.
She flew out of the SUV and followed Finn and Miller up the little ramp into the plane. And it was small. She’d seen tiny private planes that held two, but this thing wasn’t a ton bigger. Besides the pilot and co-pilot up front, the thing sat six.
Captain Finn saw her looking around, and he said, “It’s a Cessna Citation X with some small mods for us. It flies at Mach 0.97, or about 725 miles an hour. It’s a little under 900 miles to this base, so with takeoff and landing protocols, figure just a hair over an hour and half to get there or get you back here.”
She said, “I would have been willing to meet your people at the base here.”
He nodded. “And we would have gone with that, if we had any way to contact you and arrange it in advance. But we didn’t have complete confidence that you’d show up, and we didn’t have any reason to believe you would willingly go with us.”
Her phone buzzed, so she answered it, even though the jet was moving to a runway. “Terawatt here.”
Willow said, “Okay, they are who they say they are, unless they’re shapeshifters like we haven’t seen anyone do, or some Mission Impossible level disguises. Army Rangers … Both have some impressive medals … Ooh, combat training and marksman medals. Don’t let them attack you or shoot you.”
She caught Captain Finn giving a look to the co-pilot, so she asked, “Can they trace this call?”
She could hear Willow’s amusement even through the AutoTune. “Oh, no, I’ve got it re-routed seven ways to Sunday.” Willow pulled up some more info and carefully said, “Okay … Current assignment … All I got is a TLA.”
“What?”
Willow explained, “Three letter acronym. They’re assigned to the SRI, whatever that is. It’s under Homeland Security, so I’ll have to go through some heavy-duty firewalls to find out more. But leave the phone on so I can track your GPS unit, and if anything goes wrong, we’ll make with the rescue-age.”
“Roger that.” She hung up and tucked the phone away.
Captain Finn asked, “Who’s that?”
She said, “Oh, just one of my support personnel. I call her Acid Burn.”
Graham Miller laughed so hard he might have fallen out of his seat if he wasn’t buckled in. When Riley Finn clearly didn’t get the joke, Miller explained, “Acid Burn. The hot teen hacker girl in the movie ‘Hackers’? Played by Angelina Jolie?” He grinned at Alex. “If you have support staff who are as hot as Angelina Jolie, feel free to introduce us. Well, not to the Captain, he’s married.”
Alex looked at Captain Finn and said, “Doesn’t your wife worry? Or miss you when you’re on these missions for months?”
Captain Finn gave her a smile. “She’s a doctor in the Peace Corps. Right now, she’s helping at a hospital in the middle of nowhere in central Africa. So we miss each other and we both worry.”
Wow, he really was Mister Iowa.
Then it dawned on her why she was thinking of him as being from Iowa. He had to be this world’s version of Buffy’s second boyfriend. The one who was with the … umm … the DRI. And the DRI was the Demon Research Initiative, so the SRI would be this world’s equivalent, which …
Oh, crud. The SRI could be the Superhero Research Initiative. Considering what Buffy and other-Willow told her about the DRI, this could be bad. It could be really ultra-mega-bad.
Okay, now she really needed to go with these guys. And she really needed to think about how to get away if they pulled anything sneaky. So if they tried to hit her with weapons or gases, she needed to go silvery and get the heck out of dodge. And if they tried anything on this jet, she was going to … umm … Oh! She could zap the jet’s electrical systems and make everyone go for the parachutes! Then she could just jump out of the jet and fly away. And once they got to Roswell, if that was where they were really going, she was just not going to go underground anywhere they could trap her.
And maybe she needed to think about being ready to fly away if they pulled anything. If she flew away at her top speed, they could follow her easy with a jet or even a helicopter, because she just wasn’t that fast, so she needed to think about her options. A lot.
The flight was short. Once they were at cruising altitude, Riley and Graham made small talk. They asked her to call them Riley and Graham instead of Captain Finn and Lieutenant Miller, and then they asked what to call her, so she told them ‘Tera’. That was safe. But they did the chat thing with her, and they were soooo hot. She tried really hard not to give anything away, even if they were both ‘Hollywood actor’ hunky. And it turned out this Riley Finn really was from off a farm in a small town in Iowa, which not only sounded amazingly like Buffy’s Riley Finn, but also sounded weirdly like that guy Selina knew who was a top-level superhero.
There had to be a reason all these universes had such freaky similarities. Maybe Willow could come up with a theory. Or maybe Willow could find a physicist who could come up with a theory.
After a while, she had another problem. The Terawatt uniform really wasn’t designed to be in for more than a little while, and it was getting uncomfortable. And if she started sweating a lot in it, things would get gross, because the whole top and the gloves were now waterproof stuff that didn’t breathe. She said she needed to use the tiny bathroom in the jet, and when she got inside, she went silvery for a few seconds to handle the sweatiness building up inside her top. Yuck. She even remembered to flush the tiny potty to make them think she really used it. She wondered what the superheroes in Selina’s universe used for uniforms, because Selina’s Catwoman outfit looked like it was made out of leather, and the Batman’s outfit looked like it was made from plastics and metals and some latex. And what the heck was Wonder Woman’s maillot made out of?
So they buckled up for a fast landing that was way faster than in a regular jet, and then there was a jeep waiting outside the jet. She just flew above the jeep, and followed them to a simple two-story building right over by some other buildings, not too far from the main airport stuff they had near the tarmac.
There was no way of telling how many levels were underground, or if they were going to try to take her underground, or even if it would be safe for her to let them take her underground.
She would have expected a fancy military project to have tons of security. Big electrified fences, guard dogs, military guys patrolling the place, you name it. Maybe they were trying to be really subtle and sneaky, so no one would guess this was a top-secret government project. Or maybe they had already realized that none of those things would do any good to keep her out, or keep her in.
Or maybe they were in the middle of a great big military area so the fences and patrols were a couple miles away, all around her.
Miller and Finn walked to the front door, which looked like a normal glass door into a normal, glass-fronted office building. But the door needed a keycard to unlock, and it opened into a little airlock like in lots of offices in hot places.
Except, when Miller opened the door for her, she could see the glass was maybe an inch thick, and probably wasn’t ordinary glass. She wasn’t so sure she could get out of that building even if she was just in the lobby.
She floated in after him, anyway. The completely clear inside door opened to the side, with a little Star Trek kind of whoosh. But it looked like it was an inch thick, too.
And there was an elevator. Did you need an elevator for a two-story building? She was glad they didn’t try to get her in there. No, they led her past the elevator and into a nicely carpeted hallway. They escorted her back to one of the corner offices. She noticed the office just had a room number, and no name on it.
Finn knocked. Then, without even waiting for someone inside to say anything, he opened the door and ushered her in.
She stepped in, and she gaped in shock.