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Chapter 29 – MeetingHe stood up from behind his big desk, and he gave her a snarky grin. “Never seen an Air Force colonel before?”
She forced down her surprise. “Umm, actually, I have. I’ve seen you before … Jack.”
Colonel Jack O’Neill gave her a raised eyebrow and a little quirk of the mouth. “Kind of getting informal pretty quick, aren’t we? Tera?”
Wow. He was maybe as big a smart-aleck as the Jack O’Neill she had met.
Captain Finn kept a straight face, but Lieutenant Miller had to do a fake cough to hide his laugh.
He waved her to take a seat in a nice, comfy armchair in front of his desk, so she floated over and took a seat. Once he sat down, too, he said, “Now before we find out how you’ve seen me before and you know my first name, can we get you something to drink? Water? Coffee? Tea? Trust me, the tea around here tastes like Finn strained it through his socks. Go with the water or the coffee.”
She asked, “Can I get a can of Diet Coke? Unopened?”
With a smirk he said, “Ooh, not very trusting, are we? Smart.” He shifted his glance to behind her. “Miller, hit the soda machine. If there isn’t any Diet Coke, get a Diet Pepsi.”
“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Miller said, and he took off down the hall.
Colonel O’Neill said, “We’re not gonna record this meeting electronically, but I’m gonna ask my adjutant to sit in with us and Captain Finn, and take a few notes. Is that okay?”
“Sure,” she nodded.
O’Neill pressed a button on his desk phone and said, “Walter? Come on in. And bring your pad and pen instead of a tape recorder.” He looked at her and said, “Given what you’re dealing with, and what we’re dealing with, I’d just as soon keep some of this stuff out of any electronic files. That way, we never have to deal with some creepy Senator who can’t keep his hands to himself and wants you as his personal bodyguard.”
She asked, “Has that really come up before?”
Another smirk. “Need To Know, Tera. Need To Know.”
A short, balding guy in a sergeant’s uniform came in and sat in a school desk off to her right, and started writing away.
O’Neill said, “We’re not gonna ask you to reveal your secret identity, or anything like that. What I’d like is for you to tell me what you can do, and who you’ve been fighting, and then I’ll tell you some stuff in turn, and we’ll see how things go from there. And we’d like to try a couple of tests outside with some gear we’ve got, just to see how impressive you are. How’s that sound?”
She said, “Not too bad.”
He leaned back in his chair and said, “So tell me how you know my name.”
She fibbed just a bit. “You already know I’ve been fighting super-powered crime in Paradise Valley and the surrounding area for a while. I was planning on keeping it as low-key as I could, but that girl caught me on camera at a ridiculously close range. So I didn’t have any choice but to put a good spin on things. And I’d heard that the local news stations were trying to put together a story on me, and were calling me ‘ultra-chick’. Ugh.”
He snorted in amusement. “I see why you wanted people to know the name you picked out.”
She said, “But a few weeks before that, something impossible happened. A woman came from another dimension and asked for my help. It turns out there are other universes like ours, only with slightly different physical laws, so matter and energy work a little differently in each universe. In our universe, certain chemicals can cause weird effects in our biochemistry, so some people can wield superpowers. In another universe, some people can wield magic through wands.” Jack’s eyebrows rose suspiciously. “I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t gone there and seen it. And there are lots of really unpleasant universes and dimensions. There’s a world much like ours that has constant worldwide threats from vampires and demons and other nasty magical things. And there’s a world much like ours that has space travel through wormholes, and the U.S. government has a secret project called the SGC, the Stargate Command, that uses Earth’s wormhole to go to other planets to fight some really unpleasant aliens. Their top team is led by one Colonel Jack O’Neill. The other you. Who looks exactly like you do. His second in command is an astrophysicist named Samantha Carter.”
“Wait, Captain Samantha Carter? The astronaut? She’s my 2IC?”
She nodded. “Yes, sir, and in that world she’s been promoted to major already, and she’s apparently the only woman in combat situations in the Air Force, even if she does it on other planets. Sam was one of the seven people on our team, and at our final battle, she brought in help. You, a tactical nuclear weapon, and an alien who’s on your team as well.”
“And why would we trust an alien on our team, if these aliens are bad guys?”
She said, “Because you picked him yourself. You recruited him, you brought him back to Earth, and you talked the SGC into trusting him. He’s turned out to be a huge help, and he’s apparently one of your best friends now. There’s also an archaeologist and linguist on your team, and his name is Danny, but I don’t know any more than that.”
“And why would we need an archaeologist and linguist? I can see how a physicist could be key if we’re messing with wormholes and space-time.”
She said, “In their world, the Earth has been visited multiple times by aliens. The ancient Egyptian gods were really these creepy aliens that are like snakes that burrow into your body and take you over.”
“How … Heinlein.”
“So a lot of ancient Earth languages are spoken all over the galaxy, because thousands of years ago, these guys stole thousands and thousands of Earthlings for slave labor on other planets. Having someone who speaks and reads ancient Egyptian, Greek, Latin, and a couple dozen other languages is apparently a must for your missions.”
Ooh! She realized something important! “I also have information from that universe on the lat/long of each of the known alien threats left behind on Earth, as found by the SGC. I can get that to you. The U.S. government is going to be a better group for checking those sites out than me. I also have information on contacting the British Ministry of Magic, in case it exists in our universe, and information on checking for the existence of vampires and demons and what’s called the Vampire Slayer based on quotes from ancient texts. I’ll get all of that to you, so you can turn it over to whoever is the right person to do the research.”
He asked, “And these really came from different universes?”
“Yes, sir. Well, it’s weird. They’re drastically different in really important ways, like whether magic works and whether demons exist and whether we were once invaded by aliens and whether people with superpowers are running around. But in other ways, they’re incredibly similar. Like Samantha Carter looks the same, and is an Air Force officer and physicist in our world, too. And Star Wars apparently exists in everybody’s world, and an old TV show called ‘Rawhide’ which you sang with … another guy.”
He hummed it for her just to show he knew it.
She glanced behind her at Riley Finn, who was standing stiffly near the door. Just then, Graham Miller walked in with an unopened can of Diet Coke for her. He said, “Sorry it took so long, but I had to go over to the mess to find some.”
She took the can and said, “And in the world with vampires and demons, Riley Finn was an Army Ranger, too, and he was in a top secret program called the DRI, with Graham Miller, too. And a guy named Forrest. His last name starts with G but it’s not Gump. I don’t remember.”
Finn and Miller looked at each other and laughed out loud. “Forrest Gump! Oh, please sir, can we be the ones who hit him with this one?”
O’Neill smiled and said sarcastically, “Yah, sure, you betcha.”
She didn’t think she should mention any of her other teammates, just because she wasn’t sure what a secret government organization might do with the information. Sam? She was already in the Air Force. And she was a famous astronaut, so it wasn’t like they could make her ‘disappear’ or anything.
O’Neill said, “So you met another me. What can you tell me about me that you shouldn’t know?”
She said, “I don’t know. You like blue jello and the Simpsons.”
He grinned. “Who doesn’t?”
She went on, “And hockey. And The Wizard of Oz. Sam thought that was a little weird for a guy as het as you are.”
She spotted that Riley Finn and Graham Miller suddenly had to step out of the room to not laugh in front of their boss. Jack O’Neill waved it off and whispered, “That’s okay, I’ll get them back later.”
She added, “And there was some kind of chemistry going on between you and Sam that both of you were pretending wasn’t there because you’re her commanding officer. And you had the authority to take a nuclear bomb or something into another dimension and blow up stuff, because that’s what you and Sam did to make sure the threat was really done.”
Again, the smirk. “Wow, all these superpowers, and it comes down to U.S. military strategic assets? I don’t know whether that’s impressive or discouraging.”
She told him, “Well, Sam was the only person on our team who didn’t have superpowers of one kind or another, and I thought she was awesomely impressive.”
He said, “Come on. Try for something really good.”
So she tried, “The other Jack had this thing about guns, because his son Charlie got into his gunsafe and shot himself and died, and Jack’s wife Sarah divorced him. Sam said when Jack first came to the SGC, he was pretty much looking for a ‘suicide by cop’.”
She looked up and saw that Jack O’Neill looked like he was so angry he was going to explode. Jack snapped, “Who told you!?”
She suddenly felt like throwing up. “Y-your son, too?”
Jack leapt to his feet and stomped over to a window and stared out, seeing nothing. “My son’s named Charlie, too. And my wife was named Sarah. My Charlie got into my gunsafe.” He didn’t say anything else.
“Ohmygosh, I’m so sorry,” she gasped. She just barely remembered to keep up her Terawatt voice. “I didn’t know. I mean, how could I? And why would a totally different universe have something so exactly alike?” But she should have known it was possible, especially after finding out about the ‘yellow crayon’ incident with Willow. Oh, this was all her fault.
Jack whispered, “Sarah walked in, just in time to catch him taking it out of the gunsafe. I made her go through a gun safety course before we were married, but she just walked right over and tried to yank it out of his hand. His finger was inside the trigger guard, and the gun went off. The bullet went right through her hip and shattered it. The bone fragments and bullet fragments went through everything in her abdomen. She died in the OR five hours later. It was six and a half years ago, and Charlie still hasn’t gotten over it. Maybe I haven’t, either.”
Riley Finn came over and said to her, “Maybe now would be a good time to go outside and show us what you can do. Okay?”
She just wanted to apologize for like a week, or run and hide, but this was as good as she could manage. She nodded and followed Riley out of the building.
Once they were outside, she said, “I’m really sorry. I should’ve known something that bad would’ve happened here, because all the universes have these weird connections so things just fit together way too tight. I mean, did you know that in all the universes I know about, Jar Jar Binks exists, and everyone in all the universes hates him? Why would the character even have the same name across who knows how many universes?”
Riley patted her on the shoulder. “It’s not your fault. The colonel does a good job of holding it together just about all the time, but some days are worse than others.”
“It IS my fault I brought it up. I should’ve stuck with Jello and movies and stuff,” she muttered.
At least the testing they wanted was really simple. They had her fly back and forth a few times while they pointed a radar gun at her and got her speed. She found out that when she was flying in an arrow formation with her body horizontal and her hands pointed fingertips-forward — which was Riley Finn’s idea to try — she was slightly faster, and she could get up to 86 miles an hour. Okay, that meant she could be outrun by most cars on the highway, but it was faster than she had thought she could go.
They had a big electrical meter hooked up to a huge steel cable, and they had her hit it with one of her biggest bursts of electricity, so they could get some idea of her power levels. She didn’t give it everything she had, but she didn’t tell them that. She still managed to blow out some of their electronics. And she didn’t show them the tricky electrical stuff she could do.
She showed them her silver shapeshift, which she was calling a ‘morph’ now because Willow said it and it sounded cool. She didn’t show them all the tricks she could do with that, either. But she did puddle all around Riley Finn and up the side of the building, and talk to them while she was still morphing, which usually freaked people out since she had no mouth while she was morphing. She still had no idea how that worked.
Then she did some telekinetic lifting of some weights they had. She picked up six weights that together were 207 pounds, which was pretty much her best lift ever by several pounds. At least, as far as she knew. She wondered privately if she could get stronger if she did weightlifting every day like this.
Riley asked, “Do you want to call your support staff so you can let them know you’re okay? After you talk a little more with the colonel, we’ll fly you home.”
“Thanks,” she said, even if she was pretty sure they might try to trace her call. Not that she thought they had a chance against Super-Hacker Willow. She pressed the speed dial button, stalled for a few seconds, then pretended to press a few keys. She held the phone to her ear, and when Willow answered, she said, “Hi, Burn. It’s me. I just did a few tests for them so they could see what I can do. I’m gonna go have some more chats with their boss, Colonel Jack O’Neill. Then they’ll fly me home. Or I’ll fly home on my own, which would take a lot longer.”
“Roger that, Terawatt. I got your GPS, and you’re where they said. So fly mostly west and a little north till you hit I-5, and you won’t have any trouble.”
Then they went back inside. The first thing she did when she got into Jack O’Neill’s office was apologize more.
He finally got her to stop, and he said, “It’s okay. I … over-reacted.”
She said, “I don’t think so. I think you just … reacted. Like any good family man would do.”
He said, “I’d like to stop talking about that. We brought you here because we’re a recently-formed ‘black’ sub-division of Homeland Security. The SRI.”
She said, “The Superhero Research Initiative.”
He blinked, but said, “Good guess. The Superpowers Research Initiative. How’d you know? Psychic powers? Guessing powers?”
She said, “Riley and Graham mentioned the SRI on the way here, so I had time to think about it. And in the other-Riley’s world, he was part of the DRI. The Demon Research Initiative.”
“Demons?” O’Neill asked suspiciously.
“Demons,” she insisted. “Studying demons and vampires. In that universe, the DRI set up shop over a Hellmouth, but one scientist, a woman named Walsh, Maggie or Marti or Molly or something like that, went whacko. She built a Frankenstein’s monster out of demon parts and robot parts and even parts of some of her own soldiers, and it killed her and went on a rampage and nearly wiped out an entire covert base. And the town it was in. And it nearly killed Riley, and maybe it killed Forrest and Graham, because I don’t remember my teammates mentioning them as being alive after the big rampage thing.”
O’Neill glanced at Walter, but didn’t say what he was thinking. Then he said to her, “We’re starting to see super-powered crooks and threats popping up. Siberia, Bulgaria, over near Chernobyl, Ukraine, and one on the East Coast. Plus these problems we’ve been having all up and down the West Coast with powers mainly like some of yours. But you’re the first superhero we’ve found. And you already have your own supervillain ‘rogues gallery’.”
She nodded. “Really, my supervillain is Danielle Atron. Paradise Valley Chemical made a lot of GC-161 before it was revealed as a health hazard. That’s what Danielle Atron is synthesizing and using on crooks.”
He said, “Right. We know about that. We captured a couple of her ‘clients’ as she apparently calls them. We can’t turn them over to the routine police forces, because they don’t have the wherewithal to hold any of these guys.”
She said, “Talk to the Paradise Valley Chemical plant CEO and get some of the GC-161 antidote their chemists have been making for the local police.”
He said, “We’ve been monitoring the GC-161 criminals we’ve caught, and they’re all having either biochemical or emotional side effects, or unstable powers. Or some of the above. So Angleman figured you might go loopy, too.”
Great. She didn’t want to tell them she got doused when she was a tween, and she didn’t want to tell them that she had needed years for her powers to fully stabilize and evolve, and she didn’t want to admit that she had been wielding her powers for years. But she needed to say something. She told them, “Well, it did take me a while before my powers stabilized. Fortunately, the first few times I did that silver morph I was in my own apartment, because it took me weeks before I could do it and have my clothes go silvery with me. I had to consciously practice. And I had to go find isolated places where I could practice with my lightning blasts, so I didn’t hurt anyone or do any damage to anything anyone would care about.”
She wasn’t too worried about going bonkers. They could always shoot her with a dart full of the antidote if they needed to. And she knew her dad had said that more stable biochemistries had a harder time handling the changes, so the younger you were on exposure the more likely you could handle it better, because your body could adapt as you grew. But she wasn’t going to reveal that. The last thing she wanted on her conscience was finding out some crazy Dr. Walsh type person was experimenting on kids with GC-161.
There was a knock at the door, and Jack said, “Come!”
In walked a tall, handsome black guy. He said, “I’ve got our people’s reports, colonel.”
Jack glanced over at her and asked, “Okay, Gates, who did she call?”