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Chapter 41 – Stuffed UpAlex stayed in a puddle so she wouldn’t throw up all over the place. She stared up at the sky and concentrated on the cloud shapes. Her nausea just got worse. Her headache got worse. She muttered to herself, “That green stuff better be worth it, because right now I wouldn’t mind Danielle shooting me and putting me out of my misery.”
At one thirty, she got ready to fly to the Mack house for Terawatt’s official visit. She checked with Willow first. “It’s Tera. Any news?”
Willow said, “George Mack’s GPS chip just moved off I-5 toward Bakersfield. But it could just be his phone. We don’t have any evidence he’s with it.”
“I know. Give the colonel what we’ve worked out, and tell him I may be on the phone with Danielle Atron, so no phone calls. Text messages only until I call you or him.”
Willow said, “Good luck, Terawatt.” Her worry came through the AutoTuning.
Alex made sure her phone was set on vibrate for everything, and she concentrated for long moments until she was pretty sure she wouldn’t urp as she stood up. Then she went normal and leapt off the building.
Flying made her feel better. Maybe it was the air on her face. But her headache wasn’t any better, and the nausea was still mega-awful. She was never touching that green junk again. Especially when it was pretty useless, since you had to take it and let it work for at least two hours before it did any good, and then her dad said it would wear off again in maybe ten or twelve hours, even if the side effects might take a little longer than that to go away.
If this nausea and headache took longer than twelve hours to go away, she was gonna die.
One thirty. She still had forty minutes before the two hours were up and she could trust that the stuff was active. But it was going to take her longer than that to get to Bakersfield. Unless Danielle was pulling a fast one, and wanted her hostages to be somewhere far away where Terawatt couldn’t rescue them. If that turned out to be right, then Danielle was going to be in for a nasty surprise when Jack and his people hit Bakersfield.
She flew across the town to the Mack residence and landed on the front lawn. She strode up to the front door and even looked right at the camera stuck on the gutter, so Danielle would know she knew. She tried to look patient as she rang the doorbell, then knocked, and then rang the doorbell again.
She acted like she was tired of waiting, and she puddled under the front door. Boy, she needed to remind her dad to fix that weather-stripping.
She called out in her Terawatt voice, “Hello? Is anyone home? This is Terawatt! I am fully aware that you are being hunted by Danielle Atron, and I am here to help you!”
Naturally, no one said anything. She looked in the living room, the garage, and the dining room before she got to the kitchen. She hoped Danielle was tearing her hair out waiting for Terawatt to get to the big message.
She stopped and looked at the message on the kitchen table. She even turned so the oven was behind her and she could look at the camera stuck on the wall.
The message was still the same. She picked up the phone, turned it on, and pressed the speed dial.
A voice Alex hadn’t wanted to hear again answered the phone. “Well, well, well. It took you long enough, Terawatt.”
She gritted her teeth so she wouldn’t be sick on the floor. In front of the camera. “Danielle Atron, I presume. I’ve been wondering how long you’d keep hiding from me.”
With a sneer in her voice, Danielle answered, “Hiding? From you? What a laugh. I didn’t even realize you existed, until your little friend Alex Mack got those videos of you in action and put them on the news.”
Alex said, “Don’t you mean your little friend Alice Mack? Aren’t you the one who kidnapped her and her whole family and got yourself arrested for it?”
She knew. This was the moment Selina had prepared her for. If she failed to convince Gloria she wasn’t Terawatt, then Gloria became part of her team. If she failed to convince Danielle Atron, then her whole family was doomed.
Danielle corrected her. “ALEX Mack.” She asked, “If you don’t know Alex, then why are you in her house?”
She said, “Because the police gave me this address, along with that of her boyfriend, after I stopped your latest super-thug from destroying the high school that no longer bears your name. Why else would I be here?”
Danielle said, “You have to know Alex Mack. She’s the only natural GC-161 case besides you. She then turns out to be the first person who gets you on video.”
She said, “Hmm, I see your point. That sounds too coincidental to be anything except causality, even if I doubt I’m only the second super-powered person in the entire town. So … you kidnapped the Mack family because you knew Alex had powers? The police have assumed you kidnapped the family to keep George Mack quiet until after your first shipments of GC-161 diet products were selling in stores. Why don’t you ask the Macks how Alex managed to track me down first? You’re the one who has them all.”
Danielle taunted, “Why don’t you come and rescue them?”
Alex asked, “Does that mean you want to tell me where I can go, so I can walk into a massive trap? If it means rescuing a helpless family, I’ll do it.”
Danielle said, “Good. Drop all your equipment on the kitchen table.”
Alex said, “Pardon me, but you are looking at me through that camera, right?” She slowly turned around. “I have no ‘equipment’ on me. This uniform is skin-tight already. Where would I put anything?”
Danielle growled, “Fine. Keep this phone on, and fly south down I-5. I’ll tell you when you need to make course corrections.”
She said, “I’ll do that. But I should warn you. My flight speed looks substantial when I’m cutting across city blocks, but I can be outrun by most of the cars on the highway. If you want me to travel a few hundred miles, it will take me hours.”
Danielle said, “Just keep that phone on you, and we’ll know how fast you’re moving, and if you try anything funny.”
Alex lied, “My colleagues tell me I don’t have much of a sense of humor, so it’s unlikely I will try anything ‘funny’. I’m leaving now.”
She kept the phone in her hand and strode out the front door, locking it after her. Then she stood where the camera for the front door could see her, and she flew off into the sky. And she managed the whole thing without urping even once on camera.
She flew south and found I-5. The cars and trucks were whizzing along hundreds of feet below her, even if she was moving faster than most of them. She went silvery and squeezed herself into a more aerodynamic form, pointier at the front and back, smoother all over, and thicker in the middle like a bird’s body. Or a fish’s body. She was flying over a big semi truck, and judging by how she pulled ahead of it, maybe flying like this when she was silvery meant she could go a few miles an hour faster.
The wind all over felt good, but it didn’t make her nausea go away. Or her headache. And flying like this was boring. Just mile after mile of interstate, and tiny cars and trucks below that were no more than moving dots.
Her Terawatt phone buzzed, so she went normal and checked the text message. It was from Willow. Atron in Bfield same place as GM & RA, Jack alerted
Wow, maybe things were going her way.
And she spotted a big triple-trailer truck tearing down the road at well over a hundred, and definitely going faster than she was going. She went silvery and dived down to land on the middle trailer. Then she flattened out and tried to enjoy the ride.
At least, she tried to ignore the nausea. And the headache. And the stomach cramps that were starting, even though she didn’t think she had a stomach while she was silvery.
* * *
‘Major Rojo’ looked around at his people. They all detested Atron as much as he did, but she paid well, and she paid up front, and she was offering her superpowers treatment as an extra incentive. What he could do with the kind of powers that the Terawatt hottie was flaunting …
He had been quite unimpressed when he saw the outside of Atron’s hideout. But the inside looked like a high-tech chemical company had taken over parts of the building. She must have paid someone well to have all of it done. He wondered if she bribed them to keep their mouths shut, or gave them superpowers as a reward, or simply had them killed.
He had no doubt that Atron would kill if it suited her. He had seen that look in her eyes. Whenever he had faced an opponent who had those eyes, he had made sure that man was shot first, and then shot again just to make sure he was dead. He might have to do that with Atron, depending on what she did after this day ended.
He didn’t believe that Terawatt would fly in with backup, whether it was military or mercenary. But if she thought to surprise him with unpowered support, he was ready. There were real advantages to having a gravel lot around your building, instead of a paved parking lot. You could bury offensive and defensive weaponry. You could hear someone driving in. And gravel fractured into painful shards in a firefight far easier than an asphalt parking lot did. He had a solid team in strong defensive positions. Good. And Atron wished to handle Terawatt all by herself. Excellent. He had watched the news clips of her recent battles. He did not wish to find out the hard way just how difficult it would be to stop someone who could take out three heavily-armed, super-powered mercenaries in a matter of seconds.
* * *
Alex finally decided she’d rather fly under her own power and risk running out of juice, because riding on top of the wobbly trailer was making her nausea about a jillion times worse. And every time her nausea got worse, her headache flared like Jo had punched her on the top of the head. And she was getting stomach cramps. Which were different from ‘that time of the month’ cramping and felt like they were in a completely different place.
She changed her shape from a flat silvery disk to a long, thin silvery pole with a thick middle, and she lifted off as quick as she could. She went up until the cars were little dots again, and she tried to concentrate on the air blowing all around her. But she knew she still had a ways to go to get to Bakersfield, and she had no idea when Jack’s team would show up, or what dirty tricks Danielle would have prepared, or if her parents and Ray were okay.
Man, if she wasn’t a superhero, she would be giving Danielle such a pounding for doing this stuff.
Maybe she’d punch Danielle right in the snoot, just with her regular strength.
And maybe she’d urp on Danielle’s fancy suit.
* * *
Willow was trying to figure out what was going on. Ray’s GPS chip and George’s GPS chip were about eight hundred feet apart. Why were they so far apart? It wasn’t like Danielle Atron was going to have a prison the size of Alcatraz to stick people in, and even if she did, why wouldn’t she have her new kidnap victims pretty close together?
She pulled up some Google Earth images and tagged them with GPS coordinates in her new GIS program. It was freeware, and it came with the source code, which she preferred. She had tweaked it herself before installing it on her network, so a lot of the messy computational parts could be done in parallel processing, while the complex visualization part was done mostly in hardware on her big Silicon Graphics box, and her super-fast linux box handled the parallel processing distribution with a basic Linda model she had written in C, and then tweaked to run faster once it was compiled.
Her GIS stuff was way faster now. But the GPS coordinates were coming from … the middle of a big parking area.
Okay, she wasn’t using military precision on the GPS chips, but both chips had to be outside those buildings in the images. The phones hadn’t been brought in from the cars when George and Ray were taken out of the cars. Which meant she didn’t know where George and Ray and Barb were.
This was so bad. She had three warehouse-looking buildings around the open parking area, but Danielle Atron might not be in any of them. She could have used that spot for a big meet-up with her evil minions, and switching to new cars, and taking off somewhere way away from there!
Okay, sure, Danielle had done the evil gloating phone call from this spot, or somewhere really close. Willow had managed to triangulate to within a hundred yards of where George’s GPS chip was now. But that didn’t mean Danielle was still there!
She sent Jack the information she had on the GPS chips and the nearby warehouse-y buildings. Then she crossed her fingers that Danielle would send Terawatt more messages.
Oh! There was something she could do. Ooh, the Bakersfield cellular services would be so mad at her if they found out this was her …
She started typing.
* * *
Danielle Atron stared in fury at her phone set-up. No service? NO SERVICE? What the hell was wrong with people today? Why couldn’t she get the one competent phone service in the state?
All right, she was getting service again. But this time, she only had three bars. She looked at her hands. Right now, they were a dead giveaway that she was upset. She hated giving anything away. She concentrated on calming down.
And she called Terawatt back on the phone she had provided. Her computer system said the GPS chip in the phone was moving steadily southward down I-5, and was within twenty minutes of the CA-58 exit for downtown Bakersfield. When Terawatt had said ‘most cars can outrun me,’ Danielle had assumed the twit was talking about flying at forty or fifty miles an hour. But the bimbo was moving at roughly ninety or a hundred miles an hour, so apparently she meant ‘most cars on the interstate can outrun me when driven by sixteen-year-old boys with a lead foot.’
“Terawatt here. Did you hang up on me?”
Danielle lied, “I do have important things to do other than dealing with you.”
She expected Terawatt to get mad, but the bitch just said, “Is it time for some directions?”
Danielle was really starting to wonder if Terawatt cared at all about the Macks. Maybe she really didn’t know Alex Mack. If only those pinheaded mercenaries had been able to kidnap Alex, too, Danielle could have made the little freak talk, and then she would have known how Alex found Terawatt. She just said, “Take exit 257 east toward Bakersfield. And leave the phone on for more directions as you go.”
“Roger that,” Terawatt said.
Danielle stared at her phone system. ‘Roger that’? Was Terawatt military? Could she be one of the Camp Atron National Guardsmen who had taken down her hired ‘security guards’ after Danielle’s people kidnapped the Macks?
And it dawned on her. Alex Mack had seen someone get exposed that night, when the police and National Guard rescued the Macks and arrested Danielle and Lars. That was the connection. Alex Mack wasn’t Terawatt, she just knew who Terawatt had to be. A female police officer or National Guardsman or FDA Security officer who was on-site.
A bizarre analogy popped into her head. She muttered, “So … Alex. You’re not The Shadow. You’re just Margo Lane.”
* * *
Jack O’Neill grabbed the sat phone. They were nearly at Edwards Air Force Base, and Walter had a Blackhawk lined up for them to use as soon as the Cessna landed. But his cell phone wasn’t going to be working until they were a lot lower.
He had heard the AutoTuned voice before, so he knew instantly that it was Acid Burn. She said, “Jack, I’ve got more.”
“Come on and hit me with your best shot,” he smirked.
“Okay, I was trying to triangulate, and I only had it down to within about a hundred fifty yards or so, assuming Atron was still there and hadn’t moved on. So I knocked out the closest cell tower.”
“Wait, you can do that?” Jack asked. He was pretty sure he didn’t wince, but as far as he knew, taking down a cell tower electronically was pretty much impossible even if you worked for one of the telcos and you had that kind of authority.
“Oh, sure, it’s easy once you know how their firewall filters packets, and then the codes aren’t that complicated, you just have to know that there are command packets you’re not supposed to send synchronously because it’s hard for the hardware in the tower to resolve, so if you send the conflicting packets synchronously from at least three different sources at the same time, you’ve got a good chance of locking up the software until you send a soft reboot, but sometimes it gets stuck and the telco has to send out a lineman to climb up the tower and do a hard reboot and they really hate that, so don’t tell anyone I did it.”
He grinned. “My lips are sealed, Burn.”
“So anyway, with the closest tower down, her signal had to get picked up by the other cell towers nearby, and I was able to do another triangulation. So I plotted the two triangulations, and she has to be in their intersection, which means I got her down to twenty-five feet. She’s smack in the middle of the east side of warehouse two on that image map I sent you.”
“Awesome,” he said. “Anything else?”
She said, “Yeah. There’s a ton of non-standard low-power signaling bouncing off the closest cell tower. And it’s all encrypted. I haven’t decrypted it, but I came up with ten different IDs on the packets, so she may have her own army out there. I could jam them …”
He said, “Okay, I have a better idea. Here’s what I want you to do …”
Jack not only hung up the sat phone, he turned it off, just in case Acid Burn had already hijacked it.
Riley looked over from where he was prepping his weaponry. “What’s wrong, colonel?”
Jack said, “That’s not a guy with a vocoder. That’s a girl.”
Graham said, “But with AutoTune or any voice-changer program …”
Jack said, “That’s not gonna change the speech patterns. Trust me on this. I have a teenager. I see the differences every day between teen girls and teen guys, and that’s a girl between thirteen and thirty who’s a world-class babbler.”
Riley frowned. “But there are hardly any women and no teenaged girls on our lists.”
Jack gave him a smirk. “Well, that should make it a lot easier to narrow it down to one nervous, young female computer genius who babbles a lot.”
* * *
Alex was already over state road 58 when Danielle spoke up again over the cell phone. “I see you took the exit and you’re on your way. Stay on that road through the center of the city. I’ll give you more information as you need it.”
She didn’t bother to say anything. She didn’t feel tired from all the flying, but she felt horribly sick from that stupid green serum. It had better be worth all this misery, because she felt worse than she ever had in her entire life. Blinding headache, horrible nausea, ringing in the ears, hot flashes, stomach cramps …
Her stomach gurgled horribly, and the cramping went lower. And it felt like …
She gasped in horror and silently pleaded, “Oh, God, not that, too! Oh, please, don’t give me the runs while I’m in a superhero suit!”
It only took a few minutes to fly across downtown Bakersfield to … the warehouse district, just like Willow had called it. Without Willow, she would have been SO doomed.
She aimed for the warehouse that had the numbers painted on its roof. She wondered if Atron had painted them up there just for her. She could see a massive sliding door that slid sideways until the forty-foot-high doorway opening was nearly a hundred feet across. She had to wonder what the heck anyone needed a door like that for. Did they fly helicopters into the thing?
And what had Buffy said about the villains always going for the abandoned warehouses or else creepy mansions? She was sure Buffy would have laughed if she saw where Danielle had her hideaway.
At any rate, it made a really obvious entry for her. And she was supposed to be working with no backup, no support, and no advance knowledge. Because one of the many things Alex didn’t like about Danielle Atron was that smug arrogance that she was so much smarter and more deserving than anyone else on earth. But if you were gonna face off against a supervillain, it helped if they were an arrogant jerk who thought they were the smartest person on earth and everyone else was a dimwit. Because, if you wanted to get down to it, Danielle had been repeatedly outsmarted by Dave Watt because she assumed he had the brains of a grapefruit, and she still had no clue about that.
Okay, time to ignore the headache and nausea and cramping and sickness and everything else, because she needed to play out the hand Danielle thought she had dealt to poor, stupid, helpless Terawatt.
She flew into the warehouse in vertical position with one leg slightly lifted, so she looked cooler. Then she drifted down diagonally until she landed on the concrete floor about fifty feet inside the doors.
Danielle Atron walked out from a normal-sized door. It looked to Alex like a chunk of the warehouse had been recently rebuilt into regular rooms, and Danielle had maybe four floors of stuff over there.
Alex swallowed down the nausea and went with her most pompous Terawatt tones. “Danielle R. Atron? I am making a citizen’s arrest. You will accompany me to the nearest police station and turn yourself in.”
“I don’t think so, honey.” Danielle sure had the smug sneer down.
Alex lifted about half a foot off the floor and floated toward Atron. “You will release your hostage — all your hostages — and turn yourself in. You are now also wanted on additional charges after aiding and abetting in the prison escape of one Joelle Harriet Baker, and hiring mercenaries to commit more kidnappings for you.”
Danielle was way too smug. She was bound to be waiting for Terawatt to fly into some sort of trap. Alex was just hoping that Sam and the other Willow had predicted this right, and drinking that gruesome green stuff was worth all the misery. Because if there was one thing Alex was sure of, it was that Danielle Atron was the most self-centered monster in the world. There was no way Danielle was going to risk getting hurt or captured by a superheroine.
Alex flew forward another ten feet, and suddenly a shower of liquid started raining down on her. She instantly went silvery, and also pushed the liquid away from her with her telekinesis.
Okay, she wasn’t expecting another spray of the stuff to erupt from the floor grate she was floating over.
She dropped to the floor with a groan.
* * *
The Blackhawk wasn’t silent, but Jack was okay with that. They landed just on the other side of ‘Warehouse Able’ in Acid Burn’s image. Jack was pretty sure from the quality of the images that Acid Burn was just using Google Earth and superimposing GIS elements onto a picture. But he wasn’t complaining. Acid Burn was better than his two best tactical IT guys, and she had to be working with less sophisticated databases.
He let Riley and Stewart move out and check this side of the warehouse for threats. Then he signaled Graham to hop out with their ace in the hole.
Jack said, “Finn is going to move on point right through this warehouse, with me on his six. You’re going with Miller on our left flank around the warehouse, and the sergeant will follow. When you get to where you can see the target, you’ll need to drop all your gear. Now are you good with this?”
Grover Dunn looked out from that apparently-empty hoodie and said, “For Terawatt? Yes, sir.”
* * *
Danielle Atron strode forward. “You pathetic little buffoon! Did you really think that Danielle Atron would simply stand around like a simpleton and let you manhandle her?”
She watched with excitement as the woman went normal in the puddle of GC-161 antidote. And to think that Lars had questioned her when she demanded a hundred gallons, synthesized within two weeks. The woman pushed herself off the floor with one arm, so she was merely sitting in the liquid.
Terawatt carefully supported herself with both arms, and then struggled to her feet. She still kept up with the attitude, like she was someone important when she no longer had powers. Terawatt looked at her oddly, and that was when Danielle realized she had become so excited that she had lost control. Again.
She was glowing purple. She was going to get that under control soon. She was Danielle Atron! She could conquer anything.
Terawatt smirked and said, “Atron. That is definitely not your color.”
She snapped, “I really hate you. I hate you almost as much as I hate those Macks. And now that I’ve taken away your powers, I’m going to give you a little taste of your own medicine.” She held her hands a foot apart and ran a massive spark across the gap.
Terawatt didn’t react. She didn’t even flinch. She said, “How … completely expected.”
What? She snapped, “What do you mean? I have all of your powers, and you have none! I’m going to squash you!”
Terawatt calmly said, “Did you really think I would never consider what you might do when you have all this GC-161 at your disposal? Did you really think the police would never tell me about one of your shapeshifters stealing all that antidote? You are really remarkably predictable.”
“Then predict THIS!” she shouted angrily, as she hurled a massive lightning bolt right at the stupid cow’s face.
* * *
Grover moved across the gravel yard as quickly as he could. But sharp gravel and bare feet really didn’t go together. Not even after the colonel’s people gave him a cream to rub on the soles of his feet to toughen them up.
If the colonel had asked him to do something like this for Captain Finn or one of the other soldiers, he would have said ‘no way’. But this was Terawatt. This was the woman who had come all the way from California to help him when she didn’t even know him. The woman who had risked her own neck to stop two nutcases who were holding a bank full of hostages, and then didn’t ask for anything in return. The woman who had tracked him down when he was hiding on that bus and then went out of her way to save him and Cindy and his mom. Stepping on gravel seemed like a pretty small thing to do to repay her.
Crap. There were mercenaries hiding behind those fifty-gallon drums in front of the warehouse. Guys with guns and things. And he had no radio to signal the colonel with.
He stepped behind them as quietly as he could, and he stepped on wires. Lots and lots of wires. He had a hard time seeing the stupid things because they were the same temperature as the gravel and they were stationary, so they looked exactly the same ‘color’ of gray. But he could feel them, and he could see them if he looked carefully. And they ran from the warehouse out to the gravel area.
He gulped hard as he realized what he was probably touching. Electronic connections for landmines or hidden bombs, or maybe even worse. He had to take care of this first, before he started on the bad guys.
He followed the wires with his foot, and they led to a side door that wasn’t completely closed. And that would be because there were so many wires and cables leading outside. He quietly opened the door and slipped inside.
There were two guys crouched over a wide control panel of switches and knobs. He could see all that in a lot of detail, because the control panel was warm from the electricity running through the components inside.
He slipped past the two guys and found a locker full of repair gear, including several sizes of pipe. He took a metal pipe a little longer than a baseball bat, and he slipped up behind the two mercenaries. He took a deep breath and hit the first guy across the back of the head.
The second guy whirled around, pulling out a handgun and looking for threats. Grover managed to clock him right across the forehead before the guy realized there was a pipe floating in mid-air.
With both guys down, Grover disconnected the control panel from the wall socket and then started pulling wires, so no one could simply plug the thing back in and have a working minefield.
He was so busy destroying the panel that he didn’t notice the man slipping up behind him. He didn’t hear the man until there was a strange ‘bomp’ noise, and then something like a massive net hit him all over, and there was a painful shock, and something vibrating through him, and a dart jabbing him in the side, and …
Everything went black.
* * *
Alex went silvery as the lightning bolt flashed from Danielle’s fingers. It hurt as it hit her, but not any worse than the lightning caster at the credit union robbery, or the magical ‘Danielle Atron’ in that hell dimension.
She leapt into the air and flew right at Danielle, hoping to take advantage of the woman’s surprise. One of other-universe-Sam’s ideas had been to get Alex’s dad to design something to counter the GC-161 antidote. Alex had thought it was a brilliant idea. Well, she had thought it was brilliant, even after her dad told her it might make her feel sick as a side effect, and it needed two hours to take full effect, and the effect would only last for ten hours or so, and the side effects might last for a couple days, and taking it too often would probably destroy her liver and kill her. Once she took that stupid green serum and started experiencing the ‘side effects’, she didn’t think it was such a brilliant idea anymore.
She got a quarter of the way across the floor to Danielle before the other woman even reacted, and then Danielle’s first reaction was bug-eyed shock. Alex got halfway across the floor before she had time to unleash her own lightning attack.
Danielle went silvery, too, and only staggered back from the lightning bolt. Danielle writhed in pain, even though she was still silvery.
Alex got within ten feet of Danielle before an enormous telekinetic hammer smashed her into the concrete.
* * *
Major Rojo was using his infrared goggles while he was in the darkness of the warehouse areas. That was one of the traps he had arranged. Men fighting a battle in broad daylight with flashing firearms would be helpless when they ran into a pitch-dark building with no lights to assist them. And so he didn’t even realize his opponent was invisible until after he fired the capture net.
Danielle Atron had insisted on a variety of weapons, some of which she was supplying herself. Apparently, she thought that an invading group of support personnel might try something clever.
Apparently, she was remarkably correct.
Once he fired the capture net, it wrapped up the intruder and fired off a series of stunning systems. Atron was extremely untrusting. There was a sonic stunner, an electrical stunner, a tranquilizer dart system, and some sort of chemical weapon he didn’t understand. All he cared about was that the chemical was harmless unless he had certain types of superpowers.
He cursed under his breath as he realized the intruder had completely disabled the booby trap systems. It would take hours to get everything re-wired, and it would require digging everything up to make sure the right triggers would be hooked up to the right firing charges.
Then he finally lifted his infrared goggles off his eyes, and he cursed out loud. His intruder was invisible. Atron was right again, the smug puta.
He tugged the infrareds back over his eyes and did more scans of the area all around him. At the same time he triggered the cellular system Pierre had set up to run off the local cell phone tower, so their comm system wouldn’t attract the attention of the local police. He snapped, “Heads up! We are about to have incoming. And use your infrareds as much as possible. Some of them may be invisible.”
“Invisible?”
“Onzichtbaar?”
“Si. Invisible to normal eyes, but not to our infrareds. Much like the bank robbers in Illinois the other week, I assume. Our minefield and boobytraps are now out of commission, as are Petersen and Greneaux. Expect the next wave of support forces at any moment.”
* * *
Ouch. Getting slammed into the concrete hurt. And it didn’t help her nausea any, either.
Alex had been hoping to play ‘depowered superhero’ and get Danielle to walk over so Alex could spring a surprise attack, but Danielle had over-reacted and Alex had needed to ruin the surprise. And it looked like Danielle had all the powers of the magical ‘Danielle Atron’ of that hell dimension. For just a fraction of a second, Alex wondered if D’Lazza had pulled the concept of a super-powered Danielle Atron, not from Alex’s fears, but from another reality.
But Alex had been hurt before. Getting clobbered by Jo Baker had hurt worse. Her blindingly-agonizing headache was already worse than this all-over pain. So she kept going. She was slammed against the floor, so she puddled forward at her top speed and slammed into Danielle’s silvery feet.
Danielle went tumbling to the concrete floor, splooshing and rolling over. Alex was pretty sure Danielle had more telekinesis than she did, and more electrical power than she did, but Alex was the one who had the experience with the powers.
So Alex used her experience. Before Danielle re-oriented herself after that tumble, Alex used her telekinesis like a flyswatter and smashed Danielle against the concrete. Then Alex used her telekinesis like a racquetball racquet and slammed Danielle’s silvery form across the building into a wall.
Then she closed on Danielle as soon as she made the swat, because not giving your stronger opponent an opening was one of the lessons she had learned from Sam and Buffy.
As soon as Danielle hit the wall and dropped into a puddle, she tried to get back up. Alex punched her in the head with what looked like her fist but was really over two hundred pounds of telekinetic anger just barely ahead of Alex’s knuckles.
Danielle’s silvery head deformed from the impact and bounced back against the wall behind her. Danielle dived off to the side in puddle form and went normal long enough to scream.
She yelled, “Lars! Carlton! Kill ’em! Now!”