Chapter 50 – Seek

Then they did what no one else on Earth could do: they dropped a superheroine on the bad guys. She went silvery and dived into the gym bag to change into her Terawatt costume. Then she stayed silvery as Riley opened the chopper’s side door and she flew out.

There was no point in taking her tablet or her Terawatt phone, but this time she was wearing an earjack and the tactical communications system that went with it. The thing only weighed about three pounds total, including the batteries. She had it and a few other things in a fanny pack, even if she could feel the wire going from her ear, down her neck under her Terawatt leotard, and out at her right hip to sneak into her fanny pack.

She just went into freefall as a silvery blob. Jack was sure the CIA guys were in no way going to be looking for Hanna to fall from the sky on top of them. No, they were expecting her to be coming in from the south, or maybe sneaking around through the forests to come in on foot from somewhere else.

The house was a pretty A-frame with some nice little windows and two doors. One was bumped out so it could be a mud room or an atrium to keep the house warmer when people came in from the freezing winter weather. The other door looked like a normal door into the house.

She caught herself about a hundred feet above the house and flew right to the bottom of the more normal door. It had rough weatherstripping on the inside, so she had to use her telekinesis to push it out of the way so she could slip in unnoticed.

There were five guys in the house. Two were sleeping up in the loft, one was cooking, one was talking on a comm system, and one was sitting by the fireplace sharpening a knife. She figured that meant they did shifts so no one was outside all the time, maybe only four hours at a time since it wasn’t warm outside.

She puddled up to the loft and shocked both sleeping guys into unconsciousness. Then she went for the guy with the knife and shocked him. After that, she puddled over and knocked out the cook. When he fell down, the guy on the comm system cursed and jumped up just in time to get zapped from where she was floating.

She went normal and said, “Terawatt to base. Five interior down, comms probably alerted.”

“Base to Terawatt,” Jack replied. “Good. Hit the three outside positions, then search around for more operatives. I don’t expect to find any, but let’s look.”

She puddled back out the more normal door, noticing that the ‘weatherstripping’ looked like animal hide with the fur on the outside to better keep out any drafts. She stayed a silvery blob and flew only a couple inches above the ground to the first hiding spot, which was the roof of a shed. That guy had a rifle and was under a tarp. She flew under the tarp and zapped him a good one, then dumped the rifle off the roof.

The second guy was in a little hole they had dug in a still-unmelted snowdrift. The third guy was up in a tree. She zapped both of them, even if she was sort of worried about the tree guy falling thirty feet and getting killed. But he was tied to the limbs of the tree, so he just hung there. She untied the knots with her telekinesis, pulled him and his ropes into her silvery morph, puddled down the tree trunk, and dumped him inside the house on the floor. Then she went back and pulled the other two outside soldiers into her silvery form so she could dump them in the house, too.

“Terawatt to base. All known forces handled. Now searching the area for more troops. Over.”

“Base to Tera. We’re coming in now, and searching with IR. We’ll alert you if there’s any other threat.”

She took a quick look around the little house. She found Hanna’s bed up in the loft. All Hanna had in the whole world was an old encyclopedia, a book of fairy tales, and a few sets of clothes made out of caribou hide or something. And a knife. And a bow and arrows. What kind of creep raises a little girl with no dolls and nothing to play with and no one to be with?

It took about five minutes for the chopper to land in the open area in front of Hanna’s house, and then the team disembarked in two seconds. By then, Alex had every one of the CIA bad guys dumped in front of the fireplace. She had some zipcuffs in her fanny-pack, but she didn’t use any of them, since all the soldiers were shocked unconscious. She had also swung wide around the house, the outbuildings, and everything else that might hold a CIA guy with a rifle. Plus, the chopper had made two circuits around the house as it descended, so she was pretty sure the team had studied the entire area with their IR viewers and telescopes and everything.

Jack ran up to her and said, “The place is clear, as far as we can tell. You got all the Company men?”

She nodded and led them inside, where all eight guys were unconscious, side by side, on the floor in front of the big fireplace.

Jack smiled at her. “Sweet.” He pointed at Graham and Jo. “Go through their gear, make sure they’re not still armed, and zipcuff ’em. Hands and feet. Then Miller stands guard on ’em while Lupo goes outside and does a search for tracks and other indicators.” He pointed at Riley. “The radio’s still live. Try to get a command post and see if you can shut down the other HK team.” He pointed at Alex. “How are you doing on temperature?”

She shrugged. “I was mostly silvery outside, and they’ve got the house warm enough in here. So I’m okay.”

He nodded and said, “Good. You’ve got overwatch for Lupo.”

Alex nodded and went silvery before she followed Jo out the door.

Alex stayed a silvery blob, but flew up to about a hundred feet over the house, so she could watch out for Jo. She kept an eye out, in case anyone tried sneaking up behind Jo, or coming out of some hiding place before Jo could react.

Jo was really good. She moved all over the area around the house, spotting footprints and following the tracks. Alex had to go normal one time so she could contact Jo. “Tera to Lupo. Tera to Lupo.”

“Lupo to Tera. See something?”

“No, but you’re following tracks to that big tree over there. I already got the guy hiding up in it.”

“Roger that. Over and out.” Jo still followed the tracks to make sure there wasn’t something else out there.

And Jo found the original tracks coming in toward the house. They led north through a dense patch of forest to another clearing, where it looked like a good-sized helicopter had landed and dropped them off. Jo searched all around that clearing, too, but didn’t find any more tracks.

When they moved back into the house, Jack let them take a break before he had everyone report. Alex dashed out to the outhouse, which was way too cold, and then she ate two energy bars while Jack got everyone into the living room area.

Jack had people report in reverse order of seniority, so Alex went first. She explained what she did. Then Jo explained about finding the landing spot and making sure there weren’t any outriders who were off somewhere in the distance. Graham explained how he disarmed all the HK team. And Riley explained how these guys’ ‘command’ would just not listen to reason and recall everyone.

Jack looked at Alex and said, “Acid Burn called in with a note for you. The second HK team is still out there, and moving north pretty rapidly. She’s estimating somewhere around thirty miles an hour, which means no chopper but definitely something you can drive. And their ‘command’ is out in the Gulf of Bothnia, which means a ship. If they have a freighter, they could have a couple choppers and a small platoon of APCs and sno-cats they could lift out of the cargo holds with a crane and then put on a dock, or for the choppers, launch off the deck. When Riley couldn’t get their C&C to act rational, I used the sat phone and gave Langley a heads-up. They think it must be a CIA ship that’s under Liberian registration, with one of Weigler’s people at the helm. They’re trying to get him to come back in from the cold. So to speak.”

Alex asked, “If they have sno-cats or whatever, what’s Hanna gonna do?”

Jack said, “Either be run down, or be run over. We need to move south and find her before they do.”

Riley asked, “Do we abandon the house and leave these idiots?”

Jack said, “Hell, yeah. This house is not a part of our mission.” He looked over at Alex. “Which of these pinheads is their team leader?”

Alex pointed at the guy who had been talking on the radio. He was also the guy with the fancy insignias on his beret.

Jack called the chopper pilot and told him to ‘wind it up’. Then he had Alex put a coat and baggy pants and a big hat on over her uniform. Alex found out why. Jack threw a pitcher of ice-cold water in the head guy’s face and slapped him until he was conscious.

The guy way over-reacted when he came to and saw his whole team was captured. He said, “You’ll get nothing out of us. Nothing!”

Jack said, “You’re too stupid to know anything, anyway. Now we’re gonna leave. You can cut yourself loose in no time and get your radio working a few seconds after that. By then, we’ll be long gone. Your command on that little freighter has gone rogue, and you’re in deep shit. Call Langley at once and get new orders before that ship-bound moron gets you and all your men twenty-five to life. Assuming you don’t end up with all of Europe trying to blast your asses off. Your bosses have really pissed them off.”

Jack led his team off at a trot, and they were in the chopper and flying south long before any of the CIA team was out of the house to see them, or shoot at them. Not that they could have shot at them, because Graham had all their firing pins dumped in a pile outside the house.

Jack gave the helicopter pilot some orders over the chopper’s comm system, and the guy began sweeping from side to side as he flew south.

It was loud inside the chopper, so Jack used the team comms. “We need to pick up Hanna’s trail. Terawatt goes to talk her down. The rest of us move on and find the motors, and assess threat.”

So they were swinging east and west as they flew south, so they could cut across Hanna’s trail sooner or later, and know where she was. After all, they knew where she was going and where she had been, so it wasn’t like Hanna had a lot of choices anymore.

Jack was using a high-powered telescope, while Riley and Graham were using fancy IR viewers. And the helicopter was moving really fast, even with the back-and-forth search pattern.

Riley gestured hastily and then barked into his comm system, “Got a maybe!”

Jack said, “Got a track. Okay, Tera, you’re up.”

Alex went silvery, and Jo cracked the chopper’s side door about three inches. That was plenty for Terawatt. She flew out and zoomed down to find the track they had spotted. She needed to work fast to confirm it was Hanna or make sure it wasn’t, so she didn’t get left behind and the chopper didn’t miss their real target.

She flew down until she was maybe eighty feet above the ground. She stayed silvery just in case, but she could see the track. And the girl. Someone was running over the ground at a steady pace that should have been impossible for a girl with a bullet in her guts. But maybe it wasn’t Hanna.

Alex flew in to see better, and she spotted more stuff. Whoever it was, they had a rifle slung over their back and a pair of snowshoes slung over their other shoulder.

Whoever it was, they were paying attention, because Alex was still a good two hundred feet away when they whirled around and pulled the rifle up to open fire at her.

Well, she was still silvery, so she just kept going. The rifleman — okay, riflewoman — fired off a nice three-shot grouping that would have hit her right in the chest and head if she didn’t use her telekinesis to shove the bullets down into the ground. By then, Alex was within a hundred feet, and she could see that it was definitely Hanna, or at least a pretty Scandinavian girl who looked like she might be pretty sick.

Hanna fired another three-shot burst that Alex deflected into the ground, and then Alex tried to yank the rifle out of Hanna’s hands with a good telekinetic tug. But Hanna had the strap wrapped around one arm, and she was stronger than she looked. And Alex only had about eighty pounds or so of pull to use. Still, the rifle barrel went veering off to the side and nearly tipped Hanna over.

Hanna staggered and went down to one knee, but she protected her rifle. Alex wondered how hard Hanna’s training had been if she could do that instinctively when she was only sixteen. Alex was thinking that Erik Heller deserved a really big kick in the pants.

Hanna hastily struggled back to her feet, but by then Alex was only a few yards away. Hanna pulled out a wicked-looking knife, but didn’t use it. She asked something in a language Alex had never heard before.

Alex said, “Speak English. I know you know it.”

Hanna tilted her head to one side and asked, “Why would a fairy need to speak English?”

Alex went normal, but stayed floating a couple of feet in the air. “I’m not a fairy. I have superpowers. Like you do.”

Hanna said, “I will not go back with you. I will go … home. I do not think I will last much longer than that, because …” She glanced down at the blood leaking through her clothes just above her belt.

Jack’s voice blared in her earpiece. “Tera, we got four sno-cats coming up fast. We tried to buzz ’em off, but they’ve got RPGs along with machine guns. I figure you’ve got less than a minute to contact.” Alex didn’t answer him.

Alex said to Hanna, “You couldn’t get the bullet out, and you couldn’t sew up the damage inside you, and it really hurts, and you’re running a fever and feel awful, and you’re going to die soon without medical help.” Hanna nodded. Alex said, “I don’t want you to die. And I don’t want the CIA guys in the sno-cats to catch you. I want you to come with me.”

She had a momentary image of her floating there, saying in a ‘Terminator’ voice, “Come with me if you want to live.” But she figured Hanna wouldn’t get it.

Hanna jerked up her head and looked off behind Alex. Alex flew around so she was beside Hanna and could look in the same direction without having a wild child with a big knife right behind her.

Ooh, ‘feral’ was another SAT word. She should use that when she talked to Jack.

It was a few seconds before Alex heard the sno-cats. But they were closing in fast. And Jack said they had machine guns and RPGs and who knew what else. Plus sno-cat treads.

Hanna simply said, “It is too late to save me.”

Alex said, “Take my hands.” Hanna just looked at her. “Take my hands. Trust me.”

Hanna put the knife away and tentatively reached out. Alex grabbed her hands and said, “This may feel a little funny.”

She went silvery. She expected Hanna to scream or struggle or something, but Hanna just stood there like she was prepared for anything. Alex took both of them silvery and raced sideways along the ground toward a dense cluster of trees that was maybe a hundred yards off to the right. She found a dark little spot where there was still plenty of unmelted snow, and she let Hanna go normal. She made Hanna lie down there, and she said, “Don’t move. And don’t shoot anyone. I’ll be back in a couple of minutes, after I take care of the sno-cats.”

“That is not possible. You do not have a rifle or anything.”

She gave Hanna a little smile. “I have superpowers. I don’t need a rifle. Now stay put.”

Alex went silvery again and flew south, staying just barely above the ground. Then she curved around and came up behind the four sno-cats.

It was pretty obvious the bad guys had been following Hanna’s trail. They were laying back about a hundred yards from where the trail suddenly got messy and then stopped. It maybe looked like Hanna had dug herself in and was lying in wait. Like a girl with a rifle was going to stop four sno-cats with RPGs and stuff.

Whoever was leading the sno-cats was a big jerk, because two of the big machine guns opened up on the disturbed area where the trail ended, and then one of the guys put an RPG into the mess. Yeah, that would have taken care of Hanna. The creeps. Alex was really not happy with these guys.

They might have been creepy, but they were alert. One of them spotted her coming at them in her silvery form, and opened fire with one of those machine guns. But she was flying fast, even if she was low, so it took a second for the guy to track her. And then she used some of her telekinesis to push the bullets into the ground ahead of her.

And then she was darting underneath the guy’s sno-cat and firing off a huge lightning bolt into the engine area.

Not stopping, she flew out from underneath the front of the sno-cat, and she veered over to do the same to the other rear vehicle. She flew under the front, blasted the engine, and flew out underneath the back. A guy with an RPG on his shoulder was leaping off the thing, so she zapped him, too.

She curved around the battleground, while the guys in the front sno-cats tried to figure out what was going on and where she was.

She rose up in silvery form about a hundred feet in front of the two lead sno-cats, and hurled smaller lightning blasts at both vehicles. The one on the right died with a sudden thunk, and the one on the left stuttered and nearly quit.

She stayed silvery, but landed so she could use all her telekinesis if she needed to. She yelled, “I am Terawatt! You are part of a rogue CIA op and you need to contact Langley immediately! Cease this assault, leave your weapons, and take your forces home on the still-working vehicles! This is your final warning!”

Maybe she needed to take ‘getting people to do what you wanted’ lessons from Jack, because it didn’t work.

One guy with an RPG and one guy with a machine gun swung them up to shoot at her. The guy with the RPG suddenly fell forward and went face-down into the muddy ground. The sound of a distant rifle came crashing past everyone.

“Weapons down! We have snipers!” the head guy yelled.

Alex tried not to look, because the downed guy might have had body armor, but it hadn’t done him much good. There was a lot of blood over there. And she tried not to be sick, either. She yelled, “You already got your final warning! Drop those weapons, pile onto the working sno-cats, and head home! Do not ask your command for orders! He is leading you in a rogue mission! Call Langley! But leave NOW!”

She reached out and yanked RPGs and machine guns out of guys’ arms, which really freaked them out. She didn’t see anything mounted on the backs of any of the sno-cats, but she wouldn’t have had enough power to yank a mounted weapon out of its socket anyway.

The guys piled into the two front sno-cats, got the stopped one started up again, and peeled out.

As soon as the vehicles were headed south, Jack’s voice popped in her earpiece. “Nice work, Tera.”

She touched the button so she could talk back. “Thank you, sir. I couldn’t have done it without that sniper fire.”

“That was Finn. What that guy can’t hit isn’t worth shooting at. We’ll be landing there in one. Get your girl and meet us.”

“Roger that,” she smiled. She flew back to the dense trees and found Hanna lying there peeking out between two low-lying shrubs.

Hanna said, “That was … amazing. How did you drop the last soldier?”

Alex admitted, “Sniper fire. My friends have a helicopter, and we’re gonna take you to Rovaniemi Air Force Base, and then we’re going to have some doctors fix you up or else we’ll fly you to our home so we can fix you up there.”

“Where is your home?”

Alex said, “The United States. But we’re not CIA. We came here to save you.”

“Why? You do not even know me.”

Alex said, “It’s what I do. I save people. I find super-powered people and make sure they’re good guys, or else if they’re bad guys committing crimes, I put them in prison.”

Hanna looked miserable. “I am … a bad guy. I have killed … many people. Eight of them. I broke into Herr Knepler’s house. I stole the clothes I am wearing, and the weapons I am carrying. And … and I have training I cannot simply turn off like … electricity. A boy wanted to kiss me, and I thought I wanted him to, but when he moved to kiss my lips, I … reacted.” She stared down at the ground. “I grabbed his head and almost snapped his neck. I am not safe around regular people.”

Alex said, “It’ll be okay. The people you killed were bad people who were trying to kill you, and I’ll do what I can to help you. Now we need to go get on that helicopter.” She took Hanna’s hands, went silvery with her, and puddled out to where the chopper was just touching down. She puddled up one strut and into the side door that Graham was holding open. Then she let go of Hanna and let her lie down on her back on the floor.

Jack called to the pilot, “Back to Rovaniemi, and step on it!”

Alex said to Riley, “Thanks for saving me.”

He gave her a little smile. “I wish we didn’t have to shoot ’em, but I wasn’t going to let that guy fire an RPG at you.”

Jack asked, “Finn, can you help her?”

Riley said, “I can try.” He started to open Hanna’s coat, and Hanna grabbed his wrists in a fast motion. Whatever Hanna tried to do, Riley countered it by shifting his weight and twisting his arms. He smiled down at her. “You’re pretty darn strong there, Hanna. But I’m not going to hurt you. I’m going to take a look at your wound.”

She said, “You are not a doctor.”

He smiled gently. “No ma’am. I’m Major Riley Finn, U.S. Army Rangers. But I have Red Cross and field medic training.”

Graham leaned over and said, “He grew up on a farm in Iowa, and figured out he could help people a lot faster than the ambulance could get out there and get someone back to the closest hospital. He’s been taking care of people for years.”

Hanna sagged back against the floor and said, “Iowa. Capital: Des Moines. Corn and soybeans and livestock. It sounds very … pretty.”

Alex said, “All she has in that house are an encyclopedia and a book of fairy tales.”

Jack smiled. “Well, we can fix that. And once we get her patched up, we’ll get her some better reading material.”

Alex said, “I’ll pick stuff out for her.” She figured he’d give Hanna a bunch of stuff like Charlie’s old books, or the Twilight novels. Hanna was not going to get stuck with books about trains and dinosaurs, or stupid stuff with sparkly vampires.

Jack just gave her a broad smile. She figured he was already up to something sneaky.

She said, “Hanna’s got soldier reflexes. You sneak up on her, and she’ll attack.”

Jack said, “Not a problem. We have actual soldiers with soldier reflexes.”

Riley let Hanna open her own coat and pull up her sweater. He frowned over the bleeding, sewn-together bullet wound and said, “This is pretty badly infected, and she probably has peritonitis, too.”

It looked really gross and swollen and red and mega-icky, but Alex wasn’t going to say that out loud.

Hanna groaned. “Herr Knepler had penicillin. I injected myself with the liquid in the refrigerator, and put the powder into the wound.”

Riley said, “That — and your natural toughness — are pretty much the only things keeping you going right now.”

Jack asked, “Can we wait seven hours to operate and get that bullet out?”

Riley said, “Maybe, colonel. But her condition will just get worse.”

Jack asked, “How about we give her one of those IV things and get some electrolytes and sugars and antibiotics into her first?”

Riley rolled his eyes a little. He knew as well as everyone on the jet — except Hanna — that Jack knew exactly what an IV was. “Well, sir, we could put an IV in each arm and dose her with everything she’s needed for the last couple days. But I’d really rather get her to a closer operating theater.”

Jack said, “Well, yeah, me, too, but we’re the only ones who have docs who are gonna understand that she’s gonna come out of the anesthetic extra early, and she’ll probably need abnormal amounts to knock her out in the first place, and she may have abnormalities when they open her up.”

Riley said, “They’re probably not going to ‘open her up’, sir. Arthroscopic surgery’s going to be better, and I doubt we’ll be able to keep Hanna still for long enough to heal up properly if we let them do a large-scale abdominal exposure.”

Hanna said, “I will be fine.”

Riley said, “Well, her eyes are clear, and she’s tracking well. She was still able to run just minutes ago. Her fever’s not as high as I thought it would be. We can go seven hours until the operation, if we can help her on the flight home.”

Hanna said, “I had not seen a real airplane until I left father and went with the CIA teams, but they travel at three or four hundred miles an hour. You cannot get from here to Iowa in that time.”

Jack grinned and patted the back of her hand. “You need a better encyclopedia. We’ll be taking the fastest jet they’ll let us have. We’ll be doing nearly Mach one. And we won’t be going to Iowa.”

Riley said, “But someday I can show you my parents’ farm, if you really want. We have big fields of corn and soybeans, and we store our own silage, and we have our own feedlot. My folks still run the farm, but when Dad’s ready to retire, my brother Joe’s going to take it over. He double majored in business and ag engineering at Iowa State, and he’s working for the beef cattle co-op Dad’s in.”

Hanna said, “That sounds very nice, but I do not know what a ‘cattle co op’ is.”

Jack said, “Yeah. You can take Hanna and Terawatt, and they can bench-press the cattle and stuff.”

Hanna smiled. “You are very funny … for a soldier. You are not like the men who took me to Marissa Weigler’s base.” Hanna pronounced the name like it would be spelled ‘Veegler’. Alex wondered if that was a German or Scandinavian thing.

Jack said, “Well, that’s because those guys were idiots. Creepy idiots.”

Alex said, “Colonel O’Neill runs the SRI. That’s America’s program, the Superpowers Research Initiative. He’s one of the good guys.”

Jack muttered loud enough for everyone to hear, “Well, I’m glad someone thinks so. My girlfriend’s mad at me for ditching our Sunday date, and my son and Cindy are mad at me for taking Space Ghost along on the last mission.”

Alex complained, “You can’t name him Space Ghost!” He just gave her a smirk.

Then she asked, “Well, why don’t you call your girlfriend up and apologize and tell her we’re on the way home, and offer to take her out when we get back, and stuff like that?”

He gave her a pretend-horrified look and pointed at Riley and Graham. “In front of the children?! I’m shocked you could suggest such a thing! Shocked and appalled!”

Hanna asked Alex, “Is he always like this?”

Alex admitted, “Well, a lot of the time.”

Hanna smiled. “You are very … fortunate. It must be nice to have a leader like this.”

Alex gave Jack a glance and said, “Yeah, but we don’t ever tell him that because he’ll get a swelled head.”

Jack pretended to be hurt, and went and made a call on the sat phone so there would be medical supplies and a bedroll and several blankets waiting for them. Then he explained, “Okay, boys and girls, we’re going to land as close to the Cessna as they’ll let us. We double-time it in, ignoring seniority, and Terawatt does her morph thing with Hanna. First one in rolls out the bedroll down the aisle, and Tera lays Hanna down on it. Once we’re airborne, Finn does what he can for Hanna and gets her all IV’ed up, and hopefully she can get some sleep on the flight back.”

Hanna said, “Some sleep would be … nice. It was very hard to sleep on the packing crates on that freighter.”

Alex wanted to say “DUH!” to that, because how could you sleep on rock-hard crates in the freezing cold with no light and no fresh air, and hardly any food, and a stomach that had to hurt worse than anything? Alex figured Hanna was way tougher than she was.

It seemed like no time before they were landing in Rovaniemi, and the chopper was only about two hundred feet from the Cessna, which was waiting for them. Alex waited until Riley and Jo were already in the jet before she took Hanna silvery with her, puddled across the tarmac — SAT vocab word! — and up into the jet to gently lay Hanna down on the cushy bedroll blocking the aisle. Jack clambered in last, because he was the slowest, and he took the front seat. Then Alex held Hanna and the bedroll in place with her telekinesis, while the jet took off and zoomed upward.

Once the jet was leveling off, Riley went to work. He knelt in the cramped space in between a seat and the seatback in front of it. He peeled Hanna’s sweater up and tugged her pants lower. Then he cleaned up the blood, painted some sort of brown solution on the sewed-up area, and injected some stuff with tiny needles. He saw Alex watching, and he said, “I don’t want to hurt her more than I have to, so I’m using some local anesthetic before I open the wound again.”

While he waited, he hooked up an IV into each of Hanna’s arms, injected stuff into the clear solutions, and hung them from the cabin ceiling. Then he gave Hanna a couple of shots in her arms and let her fall asleep. After that, he cut open Hanna’s stitches in the bullet wound, removed the thread, which had blood and really gross yellow pus-like stuff all over it, and squirted a thick ointment into the wound. Then he taped it closed again and painted another thing on it.

He said, “Colonel, she’s got bad peritonitis. The bullet probably perforated her intestinal tract in several places, and nicked some other places. She’s lucky it didn’t hit her kidney or a major artery, or she would have bled out the first day. She’ll do better on the IVs than with food, and we’ll hit her with enough antibiotics to improve her condition until we can get her in an ER and clean her out and sew all the nicks and perforations shut.”

Jack said, “Well, we don’t have to move her. When we get back to base, Tera will puddle her straight onto a gurney, and we’ll go from there. Then after a refuel, we’ll jet Tera home.” He looked at Alex and said, “Keep the tablet. Acid Burn wants you to learn to be a computer guru.”

Alex shrugged. “I’m not that smart.”

Jack said, “You’ve gotta stop comparing yourself to your father and your sister and Acid Burn. Pick some dumb people to compare yourself to, like me.” He gave her a grin.

Jo asked, “What year are you, anyway?”

“Umm, junior. High school junior.”

Jo pushed, “And what’s your GPA this term?”

Alex admitted, “I don’t know yet, but pretty close to a four-point-oh. I think.”

Jo prodded, “And what are you taking next year?”

Alex blushed a little and said, “Umm, maybe AP calc and AP English and Spanish IV and AP chem. And maybe there’s an AP test for the Spanish, too.”

Jack grinned. “And yearbook editor and photography club prez.”

Alex pointed out, “I’ve got a co-editor and a co-president on those.”

Riley asked, “Do you have an assistant editor for covering school super-powered battles?”

She winced a little and said, “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to deal with that.”

Graham asked, “What about editors to cover school activities that are bigger than the school? Like a county-wide project? Or a student who wins the Pulitzer Prize?”

She really winced at that. “There’s no way. I’m just a teenager.”

Jo looked back and forth. “What am I missing?”

Jack grinned at her. “Are you officially signing on as a member of the SRI?”

“Yes, sir!”

He smirked. “Then you are officially in the know. ‘Annie Farrell’ is Terawatt.”

“Sir, I know that.”

He went on, “And Terawatt is high school junior Alex Mack, who uses the name A.L. Mack on her copyrighted pictures of Terawatt, and might be up for a couple Pulitzers next year for her photography. And as part of the SRI mandate, we’re going to protect Alex’s little secrets.”

Jo said, “I saw that video footage. How did she manage to do that and fight supervillains at the same time?”

Alex slid her phone out of her gym bag, slid it under the cabin seats, and brought it up behind Jo. Then she moved it around like it was panning about Jo’s face.

Jo looked at the phone and just said, “Oh. Right.”

Jack grinned. “Pretty versatile power, if you ask me. Probably great for practical jokes. Tying shoelaces together, locking and unlocking doors, deflecting footballs kicked by your commanding officers into the heads of State Department dweebs …”

She added, “Making your pen leak all over your pocket, messing up someone’s hairdo, unplugging your stuff that needs to be plugged in …”

Jack asked, “Can you pinch someone’s carotid arteries closed?”

She thought for a second, then gasped, “Oh, my gosh, I couldn’t do that, that could kill somebody!” She glared at him and said, “Sometimes you are not nice.”

He just said, “I’ll take that as a ‘yes’.”

Jo looked down at Hanna and quietly said, “I’d like to know what else Erik Heller taught her. That was basically a one-room cabin. No privacy at bedtimes … or anytime. And he probably wasn’t her real father.”

“Eww.” Alex really hoped Hanna hadn’t had that happen to her. Even if she knew it happened to young girls all over the world.

Alex suddenly felt sick as she realized something else. Jo slept with a gun under her pillow and a combat knife under the blankets. Had something like that happened to Jo? Maybe when she was a lot younger and couldn’t defend herself? Alex sure hoped not. Man, being a superhero made you learn all kinds of icky stuff about the world.

Jack grimaced. “Finn, make sure Janet gives Hanna a gynecological exam as soon as Hanna’s ready. And make sure Lupo’s present in case Hanna … objects strongly at some point.”

“Yes, sir.”

The flight was fast, but it still took hours. Alex went silvery and changed back into her outfit she’d worn Sunday morning, so she could be comfortable. She had to clean makeup off her face, too, and boy did that feel good not to have a pound of stuff painted on her skin anymore.

Jack said, “Oh, just in case you need to do some snooping around when I’m not there to provide clothes and stuff …” He gave her what looked like a small cloth valise.

She peeked inside it. There was a rolled-up ‘Annie Farrell’ wig with a pair of those BCGs, and a pair of ugly brown medium-heeled shoes, and a couple pair of pantyhose, and a polyester blouse and skirt and blazer that were folded up for storage. And there was a fancy earjack to synch with a phone or a computer tablet. And there was a woman’s wallet that had a New Mexico driver’s license and a debit card, both in Annie Farrell’s name. It had everything except a wig cap and the cosmetics she’d want to use. She figured Jack didn’t know about that kind of stuff.

He said, “And you can use the bag as your purse. The outfit’s not attractive, so you won’t call attention to yourself. And you definitely won’t look like Alex or Terawatt. Just don’t run up a lot of bills on that card, because Walter will glare at me the way he does, and you wouldn’t want that on your conscience.”

And there was the super-un-fun part of the return flight. Paperwork after the mission. Jack had her doing a mission report for him, and filling out two documents as ‘auxiliary project personnel’. Ick. Still, she didn’t have a lot else to do on the flight, except worry about Hanna. And Jack had even more paperwork than she did, which he kept trying to talk Riley and Graham into doing for him even though Riley and Graham and Jo had their own paperwork.

They stopped in Greenland to do a fast refuel, and then they were flying again. And they landed in West Virginia seven hours after they left, which meant they left at two in the afternoon, and it was still two in the afternoon. Ugh. This was even worse than flying the other direction.

Alex went silvery and took Hanna off the jet to a gurney that a guy had in an ambulance. She hovered in mid-air and stayed silvery while Riley hopped in after Hanna’s gurney and the ambulance drove Hanna off to be operated on. Then she ducked back into the jet while it got refueled.

She went normal and asked Jack, “Will she be okay?”

Jack nodded. “Yeah, as okay as we can get her. We may have to teach her she can be around people without having to kill everyone, or at least not worry about everyone attacking her if she closes her eyes. But I think she’ll be physically fine.”

Jo said, “Sir, it might be helpful if Hanna got to spend time with a more normal teen. Like maybe …”

Alex smiled. “Me! She could come stay with me for maybe a month, or … I know! She could come stay with us for fall term at school, as an exchange student from Finland!”

Jack grinned. “Nice idea. But I think we’d better clear it with your folks first, and then hit the school with it second. You do realize that when she’s all cleaned up, she’s going to be the ‘sexy Scandinavian exchange student’ of every red-blooded American boy’s dreams, right? And she has no idea how to handle boys?”

“Except put ’em in a choke-hold or snap their necks,” Jo added.

Alex said, “I know some nice boys who wouldn’t do bad stuff.”

Jack just smirked. “Kiddo, all teenaged boys, if given an opening, will try to do bad stuff.”

Alex fussed, “Not everyone’s as naughty as you! I mean, look at Grover, and … Oh, bad example.” After all, Grover had used his invisibility to stare at naked girls in the locker room showers. “Or …” Okay, even Ray had done plenty of naughty stuff over the years. “But …” And then there was Louis. “Okay, maybe you’re sorta right,” she reluctantly admitted.

Jo said, “He’s way more than just ‘sort of right’. Trust me on this one.”

Jack grinned. “Alex is just never gonna have to worry about it, as long as she doesn’t let some frat guy drug her unconscious first. Some guy pulls the ‘ran out of gas’ ploy? She flies home. Some guy gets fresh? Zap! Some guy tries to mug her with a choke-hold? She morphs, or she zaps him, or she telekinetically throws him onto a roof.” He thought for a second and said, “We’ll try to get you out here for a few days this summer, so you can help teach Hanna about being a normal teenaged girl. I’ve got a feeling she’s not up with the latest fashions and accessories.”

Alex said, “Please let Cindy pick movies for her to see. She totally needs to get used to the normal girl movie and TV stuff, not what you want to go watch. Unless it’s ‘The Wizard of Oz’.” Alex spotted Jo trying hard not to smile.

“What’s not to like about flying monkeys?” Jack asked.

Alex said, “Just teach her about Skype and get her a nice laptop, so we can chat.”

He said, “And I’ll make sure Acid Burn has updates on Hanna’s condition to send to you.” He groaned. “Now I’ve got to go explain that I’m buried under paperwork and ‘colonel’ business, so I can’t fly out and see her tonight.”

Jo asked, “He’s dating your Acid Burn? How did that happen?”

Alex said, “He figured out who she is, and he went by her home in person to tell her she wasn’t in any trouble. And she decided he was the hottest guy ever, and she asked him to take her out to dinner. And … stuff happened.”

Jack said, “You know how your typical lame Hollywood movies have that ‘nerdy but secretly beautiful female hacker’ stereotype? Always played by someone sexier than Miss America? Acid Burn to a ‘T’. She’s way too hot to be dating me.”

Jack and Jo and Graham gathered up all their stuff and waved bye as the Cessna headed back to the runways. It took a little over three hours to fly to ten thousand feet above Camp Atron, so Alex was looking at over ten hours of flight time, and it was still close to two in the afternoon, even though it felt like it was about midnight. She was going to keel over before her bedtime tonight! She went silvery with her gym bag and her disguise kit, and she flew home.


Interlude IX

‘Mister Jones’ stood where he could watch the computer screen, the video feed, and also Maggie Walsh’s face. He knew The Collective had hired her for specific reasons, and he knew she was extremely talented, but he didn’t trust her.

In a matter of days, Walsh had bullied Ristersen and Hamarthi into changing the fundamentals of their approach, and as a direct result, they had a very interesting success on their hands after over a year and a half of abject failures. And now, Walsh was directing the two men through a series of tests on the product of their labors.

Walsh muttered, “What idiots. Trying to create life from amino acids! A monumental waste of time when it was easier to start with available DNA and simply modify the gene sequences.”

Mister Jones looked at the reddish protoplasmic lifeform in the Pyrex container. It looked to him like some sort of slime mold, but it was a lot more mobile. He asked, “And what is the point of this next test?”

She gave him a nasty smile and didn’t explain. The reddish lifeform ‘leapt’ as Ristersen jabbed it with an electrical prod, and it landed on his gloved hand. He began screaming as it ate its way through the glove and began devouring his hand.

Hamarthi panicked and tried to run out, but Walsh had already sealed the door. It took a long time for the protoplasm — or whatever it was — to consume Ristersen’s arm. Then it spread, covering his chest and head. Once it covered his face, he stopped screaming and finally collapsed. But the absorption process wasn’t finished by a long shot.

Hamarthi begged, and cried, and desperately tried to get out of the sealed lab room, but it did no good.

Walsh finally marked the time. “One hour and thirty-seven minutes to complete consumption and absorption.”

He said, “That’s not particularly useful.”

She gave him a glacial smile. “You fail to see where this experiment is heading.”

He had a brief moment of understanding, and he finally gave her a genuine grin. “Dr. Walsh, I have to admit, I have underestimated you.”

She said, “Notice that our lifeform is now roughly the mass of its original mass, plus that of Ristersen and all organics he was wearing, minus some small amounts converted in chemical reactions into other compounds. For example, the CO and CO2 readings in the lab rose significantly, mostly due to side reactions of the absorption process. Now that it has a suitable initial mass, I predict that the next absorption will take far less time.”

Hamarthi began to scream in panic as the mass moved after him. He scrambled about the lab, but there was nowhere to go in a small, sealed room. Eventually it cut him off by sliding under a table instead of running around it, as he was doing. The mass pulled him to the floor and flowed up his legs …

Mister Jones glanced at Walsh’s ruthless expression and softly said, “I really, really underestimated you. I apologize. I shall endeavor not to do so again.”

He didn’t say so out loud, but part of that estimation was going to involve never turning his back on her again.

 
Next Part                Previous Part                 Chapter Index