|
|
Chapter 30 – Meeting IIGates! It was Forrest Gates. That was the name. But Jack had already figured that one out. And Gates was pausing before giving his report, because she was in the room. So Jack wanted her to hear the whole deal, and maybe give stuff away by how she reacted. She would have to remember that he was smarter than he acted, and pretty sneaky when he wanted to be.
She would also have to remember that just because her Sam’s Jack O’Neill was a good guy, that didn’t mean this Jack O’Neill was. ‘Friendly’ didn’t automatically mean ‘good guy.’ Danielle Atron did a pretty good job of pretending to be smiling and friendly to a lot of people, right up until the end. Alex was going to have to watch out for that.
Lieutenant Gates glanced at his clipboard and said, “We couldn’t trace the call, sir. Whoever it was either has NSA-level connections or is a serious threat as a phreaker, and the NSA is disavowing all knowledge, for what that’s worth. The call routed through a comm satellite, the White House switchboard — and we have no idea how that was managed, but it was a bitch to trace through — a European comm satellite, the University of Arizona computer center’s switchyard, a Japanese private comm satellite, a phone anonymizer in Finland that we had to burn an NSC favor to squeeze through, and a Skype multi-user switching system in Virginia, which is where we lost it. We don’t know how many more drops they ran through.”
“Trick-y!” Jack said.
Gates went on, “And from what Finn heard in the jet, the person at the other end — presumably female, but that’s easy to fake with a voice modifier — was able to get into a DoD computer and read Finn and Miller’s jackets without much trouble. So our IT people think Terawatt has managed somehow to enlist one of the major crackers, like S4l1x680 or possibly P$ychon4ut, on her support team. They don’t know who, because S4l1x680 has been gone for almost a decade, and P$ychon4ut vanished two years ago. Also, he has always been adamant about being a white atheist male in all his interactions. Which may also mean there’s a new cracker out there who perhaps has enhanced computer abilities through some sort of chemical exposure.”
Jack frowned, but said, “Tell the guys I said ‘good work’.” He looked at her and said, “I don’t suppose you wanna tell me about your computer support …?”
She said, “I have some. I think we both know that it would be better if I didn’t reveal who they are. At least until we find out whether we can really trust each other a hundred percent.”
He nodded. He looked back at Gates and said, “What about the second report?”
Gates said, “I’ve got it, sir. You want me to read it out loud? Here? Now?” O’Neill just made a ‘hurry up’ gesture with his hand. “Okay. Is Terawatt stable? Dr. Fraiser says yes. In fact she said quote ‘she is at least as stable as the colonel’ unquote. Dr. Angleman said ‘maybe’.”
Alex interrupted, “Dr. Fraiser? Dr. Janet Fraiser? Red hair? About so tall? You — I mean, other-you — said she really liked jabbing people with huge needles, and Sam thought you were kind of, umm, needle-phobic.”
O’Neill’s eyebrow went up. “You met Dr. Fraiser, too?”
She shook her head no. “I didn’t. But H–… umm, someone did and talked about her with Sam while I was around. Sam really likes her and thinks she’s a great doctor.”
O’Neill nodded. “Well, that just shows your Sam has great taste. Do you know the name Dr. Angleman, too?”
She admitted, “No. But I only have a few names from stories some of my teammates told me, and I was only in the other universe for five days.”
O’Neill looked at his adjutant and said, “List Terawatt as ‘stable’. I’ll take Janet’s professional opinion over that bozo’s any day.”
Walter said, “Yes, sir. Shall I put that exact wording in the files?”
“Stop smirking, Walter.”
Gates said, “I have Finn’s report on her powers, too. Top flight speed of 86 mph, even if we don’t have details on maneuverability or maximum distance. Her best electrical burst burned out our meters, so we don’t really have a measure on her voltage or amperage.”
“Sorry,” she said.
Gates smiled at her. “Don’t worry about it. We know what the meters are rated, so at least we have a number we know you can top.” He looked back at the colonel and said, “Shapeshifting seems like what we’ve seen before in some of those California perps, only a lot more control. She can turn into a semi-liquid silver substance. It looks like we have conservation of mass, but we’d need detailed measurements to tell. She has sight and hearing, and can even speak while she’s shifted, and she can go uphill, downhill, even up walls. But we didn’t see anything except a silver ‘blob’ form. And her best telekinetic lift was 207 pounds.”
Jack snarked, “So we just put a weight belt on Walter and you can’t move him? Sweet.”
She said, “My powers aren’t that impressive compared to, say, a fully-armed Army Ranger squadron. But I’m not the only one out there now, because of Danielle Atron. If this chemical can do this to me, what’s happening at toxic waste dumps and chemical spills all over the world? It would be great if you guys would team up with me on this. We need to track down people and make sure they get the help they need. Maybe they want to be superheroes, too. Maybe they want to be supervillains and they need to be locked up somewhere safe. Maybe they just want to be cured, or not die of cancer or poisoning or whatever. I want to help people, and this sounds like your job.”
Jack smiled at her. “It’s pretty much our mission statement. Particularly since we know the Russians and the Eastern Europeans have a few toxic waste spills and radioactive waste spills that make our worst problems look like a knocked-over ice chest at a picnic.”
She lied, “Well, I don’t know any of the chemists and such at Paradise Valley Chemical, but you ought to set up a grant with the researchers there. I do know that their new CEO is a former bigshot with the FDA and a really big name in the pharmaceutical business.”
He nodded, and glanced over to make sure Walter was writing this stuff down. He said, “Okay. So I want to have some more chats, maybe on your turf instead of mine. You know, get to know each other better, maybe learn to trust each other. I want to make sure we can help you in case of emergency, and I’d like you to think about helping us in case of our emergencies.”
She grimaced. “It would sort of depend on what kinds of emergencies you’re talking about.”
He said, “Naturally. But the next time we have a flying invulnerable guy who throws fire around, blazing up I-5, I’d like to think you’d help us out before he dived into your town and tried to incinerate some teenager in a bikini. Which sounds eerily like a bad 1950’s B-movie.”
She agreed, “Definitely. I do want to help you with things like that. But you’d have to tell me what you were facing, and how are you going to get clearance for something like that? You don’t even know my real name.”
Smirking, he said, “Well, we have Walter. And what he can’t work out with rules and protocols isn’t worth messing with. And I’m going to give you three phone numbers and an email address. All three numbers are secure, but not the email, which is what we call a ‘blind drop’ in the biz.”
As he wrote stuff down on a notecard, she gave Walter her Terawatt phone number. Then O’Neill said, “Next, we’re going to work with Camp Atron — seriously, is everything in your area named Atron? — and arrange a little office or conference room we can use when we need to, so we can fly in and meet with you once in a while, when it works for both of us. And if there’s something we can do for you, just ask.”
Well, she had been thinking about this stuff for a while. She said, “If you could arrange for someone at Camp Atron to give me serious martial arts training, that would be great. Maybe a couple times a week? I’ve been faking it for the most part, and the little bit I know has come in really handy already.”
O’Neill nodded. “We can set up something. If it’s at that base up there, it would be with someone not in the SRI, so you couldn’t reveal your secret identity.”
She said, “That’s just what I had in mind. Terawatt learns martial arts, the real me doesn’t.”
“Anything else?”
She thought about dealing with her sweat on the way down here. “Umm, do you guys have any special super-fabrics or super-armor? I’d like to upgrade my uniform, because right now it’s a leotard with a special spray over it.”
He said, “We don’t have anything that isn’t heavy armor. The tac teams wear armored vests that have steel plates over a ceramet lining over Kevlar, and those things weigh about twenty pounds, and they’re over an inch thick. Plus, you can do that silver shapeshift and get a lot more bulletproof than even a guy in bomb disposal armor. I saw that footage of you fighting the guys with the machine pistol and the grenade launcher and the powers. When you talked to the newsie afterward, there wasn’t a mark on your costume, and you didn’t have a hair out of place.”
Jack O’Neill walked her out to the tarmac again, and the Cessna was sitting there waiting for her. Just her. No Army Ranger company on the way back. He said, “So, Tera, don’t be a stranger.”
She smiled and shook his hand, then she flew into the Cessna and used her telekinesis to pull the door shut after her. The plane was taxiing onto the runway while she was still getting a seat and buckling up. It took off at an even sharper angle, with even more acceleration this time, so they were at cruising altitude and cruising speed even sooner. The pilot said, “Hope you don’t mind, ma’am, but we have to hurry on this round-trip.”
She said, “I can help even more. When you get near Paradise Valley, how slow do you have to get to let someone crack open the exit door for, say, a parachutist?”
“Down to about three hundred.”
She replied, “Good. If you go down to five or ten thousand feet and three hundred miles an hour, I can jump from there.”
The pilot said, “We can work with that. It’ll save us a good half hour, what with landing and takeoff protocols.”
* * *
Jack sat down in his office and said, “So … What do you think of our superheroine?”
Walter thought it over for a couple seconds and then said, “She sounds serious. And we don’t have any evidence that she’s done anything criminal or even suspicious.”
Graham Miller said, “She seems too good to be true, sir.”
Riley Finn said, “I don’t think that’s her normal voice. She slipped once or twice when she was upset over making you upset.”
Jack said, “So that would make her concern genuine, so she’s a nice kid. Or else she’s an Academy Award-winning actress, too. Anything else?”
Finn said, “I’d like to know where she picked up her support staff. And especially her computer hacker. Her phone messages were heavily routed, and highly encrypted, which you shouldn’t be able to do on a civilian phone.”
Jack said, “There aren’t many computer crackers or phreakers out there who can do all of this, and we know there are only a few of them, none of them easy to find, much less enlist. So let’s assume her hacker is legit. Come up with a list of the top hundred computer gurus in the country who have this kind of expertise. Computers and telephones, along with networks and telco connectivity, and someone who can program chips like in a phone. Someone who can play with communications satellites and international telecommunications has to have learned that much somewhere. Then weed through the list until you have just the people who are good enough to pull this off. Then check and see if any of them could have had interactions with Terawatt, or even interactions with something weird, over the last two years.”
Miller said, “One thing we can’t check is a meet using her powers. Someone like, say, Bill Gates, is too well known and too highly tracked to run into someone new without a hundred newsies noticing, but Terawatt could have flown up to his house in the middle of the night, oozed under his door in that semi-liquid form, and surprised him without anyone knowing.”
Jack waved his hand, “Fine, fine, keep little Billy Gates on your list if you want. Now here’s what I noticed. She’s trying to look and sound older than she is. She’s aiming for mid-twenties or late twenties, but she slips up and drops in younger-sounding phrases once in a while. So we have to consider that she’s maybe sixteen to twenty, instead of twenty-three to twenty-eight.”
Walter said, “I don’t know any sixteen-year-olds who are built like that.”
Finn said, “Implants. Or falsies. The hair could be a wig, or a dye job, too. She’s wearing five-inch heels to look taller.”
Jack said, “So we could be looking at a high school or college-age girl, 5'6" to 5'8", unknown hair color, slender but not underweight, probably athletic, possibly a normal cup size. And she’s a student in Paradise Valley. Walter, put together a list of all the possibles there. Don’t forget to include former high schoolers who didn’t go to college.”
Walter said, “I don’t think a high school kid would be this responsible. Maybe not even a college kid.”
Finn said, “We have to consider whether that story about going to another dimension could really be true. She did have some disturbingly accurate details on all of us.”
Jack said, “Which reminds me. I want a full psych eval on Maggie Walsh before she sets foot in any of our bases. I told you she gave me the creeps, and you laughed me off.”
Walter said, “I’ll ask Dr. Mackenzie. He’s no-nonsense, and he won’t be fooled. She has a psych background to go with her other degrees, so it would be trivial for her to fake it on the psych tests she took.”
Jack said, “Good. Because there is no freaking way Terawatt could have known we were about to hire Walsh, and if that story was true, there was a Walsh in another universe who makes Dr. Frankenstein look pretty rational.”
Miller said, “That ‘superheroes in another dimension’ story could explain a lot, if you think about it. She could be a normal teenager who found out what she could do, and maybe she saw what happens to supervillains and she decided to straighten up and fly right. Literally. And maybe she got some coaching from the other heroes.”
Jack clapped his hands together. “Okay, kiddies, some of us have families to get to, and some of us have big, icky assignments to work on. Time to get going.”
* * *
It was about an hour and a quarter after takeoff that they started to descend, and only about ten minutes after that when the co-pilot stepped over to open the door for her. He said, “Good luck, ma’am.”
She said, “Thank you.” Then she went silvery and slid out as soon as he had the door cracked open about four inches.
She just pulled herself into a round blob and let herself fall through the air for a bit. It was really pretty cool. She was dropping fast, but moving forward even faster, so it was a while before she even bothered to use her telekinesis to do any flying. She mainly just lifted herself up a little bit so she wasn’t falling all that fast, and let the air pressing on her front side gradually slow her down. Since she started at three hundred miles an hour going forward, it took a while for the drag of the air in front of her to slow her down a lot, even if she was in a round ball shape instead of a person-lying-on-their-stomach shape.
When she reached the outskirts of Paradise Valley, she changed her shape some. She went from being pretty much round like a ball, to more of a thick disk, with the flattened side facing where she was going. That really upped the wind resistance and slowed her down a lot more. Not that she was in a big hurry to slow down totally, because flying super-fast like this was just plain awesome. It would probably kill her or at least damage her skin if she tried doing it without being silvery, but it was just exciting like this.
She zoomed into Paradise Valley at maybe a hundred fifty miles an hour, although that was a huge guess based on the cars zooming up and down the interstate, since she was going about twice as fast as the cars heading her direction. It was close to nine-thirty, and she was starting to worry about whether Willow or Gloria had called her parents. She was worrying about whether Willow had called Gloria and Ray. She hoped everyone wasn’t worrying about her.
She flew down into one of the dry creek beds and zipped over to a storm drain she could use. She was flying faster than she was used to, so she had to use her telekinesis to brake pretty hard, and she still jetted past the drainpipe she wanted and had to turn around and come back. Then it didn’t take long to fly up the pipes and follow the route to the storm drain in front of her house.
She puddled up from there, puddled up the driveway, and went under the front door. Then she called out, “I’m home!”
Her mom came running out of the home office and hugged her. “Oh, honey, we were so worried!”
Her dad came out of the garage and hugged her, too. “Willow called us, but we still didn’t know what happened to you, and the evening news made it looked like you just vanished inside the bank.”
Her mom said, “And you probably haven’t had a chance to eat or anything.”
Alex admitted, “I am pretty hungry.”
Her mom asked, “Do you want to change out of your uniform first?”
And that was when Alex realized how stupid she was. “I left my bag and my car at Gloria’s! Anybody could come along and steal my cameras out of there!”
Her dad checked, “They’re in your bag, under the spare tire, right?”
“Yeah …”
He said, “I’m pretty sure no one’s going to check inside your spare tire compartment, honey.”
“Unless they steal the whole car,” she worried.
Her mom led her into the kitchen, where there was still one place setting on the table, and the salad was still sitting out in the salad bowl. Her mom said, “And we kept a casserole dish warm for you, with some slices of the pork roast and I made your favorite gravy, and I fixed the peas with little pearl onions the way you like.”
Oh, boy, it sounded like her folks were really worried about her. That made her feel great, but it also made her feel really bad that she was putting them through all this stuff. She said, “I’m really sorry I couldn’t call, but I could only call Willow because they were trying to monitor the calls I made. And they flew me in a super-fast jet out to their secret base in New Mexico and back. They wanted their boss to talk to me in person, and they wanted to see what I could do, and they want to work with me, or at least get me to work with them.”
“Is there a difference?” her mom asked.
She frowned and wiggled her hand from side to side. “Maybe, maybe not. It kinda depends on what they’re doing, and if they’re good guys or not, and what they want to do with people they catch.”
While she ate, her folks called all of Team Terawatt on the team phones and let everyone know Alex was home and safe after a trip to the SRI. She even made sure Willow could send Jack O’Neill the information from the SGC and the British Ministry of Magic and the Vampire Slayer. Willow already had copies of the files from Alex, and she fired them off using some fancy computer trickery so it would look like they came from Jack O’Neill’s home computer. Alex grinned as she imagined the look on Jack’s face when he saw where the files supposedly came from.
Then after dinner, she puddled back out to the storm drain and flew back to Gloria’s shop and switched back into her regular clothes before driving home again.
And she still had homework to do. Great.
She was in the middle of Spanish homework when her Terawatt phone buzzed. It was Willow again.
“Terawatt here.”
Willow’s AutoTuned voice said, “I may have found a hit. It’s a high school in Normal, Illinois. It happens to be not too far from a big chemical plant with a research division. And people are saying it has poltergeists, which may mean someone with telekinesis. And at least one teenager is now missing. Maybe two.”
Alex gulped. “That doesn’t sound so normal.”