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Chapter 107 – Dropping the BallAlex gulped and dropped to the ground. Then she lowered Shar as fast as she could without actually dropping her.
“Hey! How come you …” Shar finally realized someone was watching from the porch. “Uh-oh.”
Aunt Ashley grabbed onto one of the porch posts like she was about to fall over. “Alex! You … I … You were flying! And … lightning! And … And Shar … And fire! And … I need to sit down.”
Aunt Ashley sort of flumped backward but there was no chair there, so Alex caught her with a quick TK grab so Ashley didn’t crash onto the porch and maybe get hurt.
Unfortunately, Ashley noticed that, too. “How … Alex, you have superpowers! How …” She blinked and asked, “Why isn’t anybody else freaking out about this?”
Alex pulled a lounge chair over with her TK, slid it under Aunt Ashley, and gently set her down on the chair. “Aunt Ashley? Are you okay?”
“No, I’m not okay! One of my nieces has superpowers! And maybe Shar does, too!”
Annie knelt down and took Aunt Ashley’s hand, and then checked her pulse. Willow asked, “Is she okay?”
Annie nodded. “Yeah, just really surprised.”
Aunt Ashley complained, “Surprised? I’m a lot more than surprised! Alex has superpowers! She can fly! And throw lightning! And she caught me when I was about to fall down! That’s like Terawatt or something!”
“Oops,” said Shar.
Alex exhaled unhappily. “Okay, I need you to keep a secret, because I’ll be in trouble if anyone finds out I have powers. Can you not tell anyone?”
Aunt Ashley immediately checked, “Do your folks know?”
Alex stalled, “Grandpa and grandma don’t.”
“But Barb and George do,” Ashley guessed. “Have you been doing anything bad with your powers? Is that why you don’t want me to tell anyone?”
“No!” insisted Shar angrily. “Alex would never do that! She’s the good guy!”
Alex gently reminded, “Shar? Remember our talk about keeping secrets?”
“Oops.”
Willow pointed out, “She is your aunt. And she already saw most of it.”
“MOST of it? There’s more?” Ashley squawked.
Willow looked at Alex. “Oops?”
Boy, and Alex thought she was bad at the whole secret identity and keeping a secret thing.
Alex gently said, “Aunt Ashley, can you promise to keep the secret, no matter what? And not tell anyone? Not even grandma and grandpa? You can talk to Mom and Dad about it, and Annie. But no talking about it to anyone else ever. Not to a boyfriend, or your BFF, or talking about it over a phone, or even writing it down in your diary.”
Ashley smiled. “You make it sound like it’s a matter of national defense or something.”
Alex insisted, “It is.”
Annie said, “I think we need to show her.”
Alex nodded. “Me, too.” She asked, “Do you think you can walk upstairs okay, or do you want me to carry you?”
Ashley gasped, “You can’t … Oh. Superpowers. Good God, Alex! You have superpowers!”
Alex just smiled a little, “Yeah. I kind of noticed.”
Ashley stood up, but she looked kind of wobbly.
Annie asked, “Was I this bad when you told me?”
Alex admitted, “No, because you were pretty much in full ‘we must study this for science’ mode.”
Willow confessed, “I kind of freaked when she told me.”
Shar hopped up and down. “I didn’t freak out! ’Cause I have superpowers, too! And she rescued me.”
Aunt Ashley asked, “There’s more going on here than I’m seeing, isn’t there?”
Alex nodded. “A lot more.”
Ashley wondered, “What about Annie? Or Willow?”
Alex smiled. “They just have super-brains.”
Annie confessed, “I think Alex only told me because when she first got her powers, she couldn’t control them. Especially the shapeshifting. And some of the other stuff. And she needed my help. Maybe I wasn’t the most sympathetic big sister ever.”
Alex disagreed, “But you always came through for me, whenever I had a power problem. Always. The whole time you were in high school.” Annie gave her a hug.
Aunt Ashley blinked. “But if Annie was in high school …”
Alex told her, “I got my powers the first day of junior high. I’ve had ’em for over five years.”
“Wow,” muttered Ashley. “That’s … That’s longer than Terawatt!” Shar burst into giggles. “Why is that funny?”
Alex led Aunt Ashley up to her bedroom and said, “This is why.” She went silvery, dived into the gym bag under her bed, and flew out a couple seconds later before going normal in mid-air as Terawatt. She even gave Ashley the superheroine pose and the Terawatt voice. “Excuse me citizen, but have you seen something that’s a matter of national defense?”
Ashley’s legs gave out, and she sat down hard on the bed. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God! You’re … You’re really Terawatt?”
Alex used her TK to pull off the mask and wig and ‘lipstick’ and ‘eyeshadow’. In her real voice, she softly murmured, “I really am.”
“And you fly around the world fighting monsters when you’re not in school?” Ashley giggled hysterically and said, “That sounds insane when I say it out loud.”
Shar exclaimed, “Fighting monsters, and stopping badguys, and rescuing people like me, too!”
Aunt Ashley said, “I need to sit down.”
“You are sitting down,” Annie pointed out.
“Oh. Good. If I faint, don’t throw cold water on me. Or hit me with that lightning.”
Willow sat down next to her and patted her hand. “It’s okay. I’m a complete weenie about stuff, and if I didn’t faint, you won’t.”
Shar said, “She really wants a drink, but she doesn’t want to say so in front of a bunch of minors.”
Willow frowned. “I don’t know if George even has any alcohol in the house.”
Annie shouted, “Oh! I know!” And she dashed out of the room.
Aunt Ashley finally looked at Shar and gasped, “You read my mind! You have … umm … psychic powers!”
Shar shrugged and waved her arms, “They’re kinda iffy. I’m not really good at it. I mean, I almost always know what Alex is feeling even when I’m way away from her, but that’s because she’s Alex. Most people, I can’t read their minds at all unless I’m really, really close by and I’m trying really hard and they’re feeling something major. Anyway, I’m way better with my fire.”
Annie came running back into the room with a metal sphere hooked by a plastic tube to a clear facemask. “Here! It’s oxygen. Put this over your nose and mouth, and breathe deeply.”
Aunt Ashley rolled her eyes. “Annie, I’m a flight attendant! I know how to use an oxygen mask. We have to have training with ’em.” She held the mask over her face and breathed in and out a few times. She finally put the mask down. “Okay, I feel less light-headed. I’d still like a double shot of Jack Daniels, but don’t tell Barb or your grandmother I said that.”
Alex used her TK to pull her wig and ‘makeup’ and mask back onto her face. She said, “Now you know most of it. I’ve been Terawatt since spring. I’ve had powers for years. I made the costume because Danielle Atron was sending supervillains here, and somebody needed to stop them. Now I help the federal government, and anywhere else that asks for my help.”
Willow complained, “And our state governor is still being a complete doofus about supporting a superheroine, but Terawatt’s deputized by the President now, so he can stuff it.”
Alex explained, “Annie’s my biochemistry support. Dad is, too, now that he knows. I didn’t tell him or Mom for years, because Dad works at the plant, and the head of the plant was trying to track me down so she could cut me up and experiment on me.”
Aunt Ashley looked pale again. “Wait a minute … Danielle Atron was after you? One of the most wanted criminals in the country? She was after you?”
Alex nodded. “But if she hadn’t been such a creep, I probably wouldn’t have turned out to be a superheroine.”
Ashley asked, “And what about Margaret K. Walsh? And the Downingtown Blob?”
“And a lot of other stuff,” Alex added. “Yeah, Maggie Walsh is one of my major problems these days.”
“That Wacky Maggie!” Willow said in her fake-cheerful voice.
Alex went on, “So I have a small team of people who know my secret, and some of them are support personnel, like Willow and Annie and Dad.”
Aunt Ashley asked, “Willow? I thought you said she had her own computer company.”
Alex nodded. “Yeah. She happens to be the greatest computer whiz on the planet. She’s my computer support.”
Ashley muttered, “I feel like I just fell into a Marvel comic.”
Willow bubbled, “Well, yeah, but it’s the best Marvel comic ever, even better than the original Spiderman comics, or ‘Watchmen’, or ‘Sandman’, so it’s a great comic to fall into, and you’ve got the superheroine on your side, so you’re good to go.”
Ashley asked, “Did she really say all of that without taking a breath, or am I still woozy?”
Alex frowned. “I didn’t mean to surprise you. You weren’t even supposed to see.”
Aunt Ashley sighed, “Well, everyone else wanted to shop for a couple of hours, so I let them drive off, and I came back into the house to sneak in a nap. Then I heard you all in the back yard.”
Shar winced. “Maybe I was a little teeny bit too loud.”
Willow hugged her and said, “Maybe next time you don’t actually need to shout ‘Kapow!’ when you firebend.”
“But it’s better with the kapow!” Shar fussed.
Ashley looked at Alex and carefully asked, “And you’re sure the government isn’t getting you to do anything bad?”
Alex nodded firmly. “Totally sure. Willow would find out with her computers. And believe me, when you’re fighting giant monsters or rescuing little girls, it’s pretty easy to tell you’re the good guy.”
Shar ran over and gave Alex a big hug. “She rescued me from the bad guys, and then her and Hanna and Colonel Jack made sure I could tell some generals about the bad guys, and they locked ’em all up.”
Ashley looked at Shar, then at Alex. “I still don’t get it. If she has superpowers …”
Alex looked at Shar, who clearly didn’t want to be the one telling the story. Oh, well. “These badguys who aren’t at all like Jack kidnapped Shar and her dad and made Shar do ‘experiments’ for them, and then when Shar and her dad tried to escape … they killed her dad and tried to kill her. Turns out those experiments they made her work on? They sorta prepped her for fighting off an army of security men and armed spies.” Shar buried her face in Alex’s side and started crying as the memories came rushing back.
Ashley whispered to Shar, “I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t know.” She looked up at Alex. “Hanna? And Colonel Jack?”
Alex insisted, “Need to know. Really. The more you know, the more stuff you could accidentally spill. I wasn’t ever going to tell you about Terawatt as it is. Just plain old Alex is enough.”
Ashley got a miserable look on her face. “I was going to give you a giant graduation present and take you away from California for the first time to Paris, and you’ve already flown all over the world!”
Alex said, “But I never get to have fun and see the sights and go do touristy stuff. It’s always fly in, fight bad guys, kill monsters, zoom away. It’s not any fun. Going to Paris with you would be utterly awesome.” She swallowed and added, “Unless you’re worried about being around me and stuff.”
Aunt Ashley rushed over and gave Alex a big hug. “No honey, not at all. It’s just … a big shock.”
Willow smirked, “She’s good at the big shocks.” Shar and Annie giggled.
Ashley complained, “And can you lose the high heels and the giant boobs? It’s sort of … freaky.”
“Sure,” Alex smiled. She went silvery, dived into her gym bag, and changed back to Alex. Even if her hair was sort of smooshed down. She needed to fix that before the grandparents got back.
Aunt Ashley looked at her and finally wondered, “Is this why my niece with the gorgeous, long blonde hair is now a brunette with short hair?”
Alex nodded. “Yeah. I’ve been distancing myself from Terawatt. I’m short, she’s tall. I’m a brunette, she’s a blonde. I’m flat, she’s busty. We don’t look alike, and we don’t sound alike, and we don’t act alike. And Terawatt’s getting martial arts training, while I obviously don’t have any.”
Ashley protested, “You’re not flat! You’re the same cup size as me!”
“You know what I mean.”
So, while Alex fixed her hair back, Annie and Willow regaled Aunt Ashley with some stories about what Alex had really been doing since Ashley’s last visit. A couple of times, Ashley looked like she might get faint again. At least Willow didn’t tell the whole thing about the giant spiders.
* * *
So, after everyone flew home and the Thanksgiving holiday weekend finally ended, Alex tried to fit back into the normal school schedule. Even if the high school basketball season was starting on Wednesday night. And Ray was going to be starting as the point guard for the team!
Okay, he was really good even before he got exposed to the GC-161, and he had been the starting point guard all last year, too, except when Jackson was out hurt or the time when Jackson got benched for four games, and then Ray had been the starting shooting guard instead, and he’d been really good at that, too. It was just that now he could jump a little higher and react a little quicker and sprint a little faster.
Alex went to the game, and took her cameras, and even got to roam the sidelines as a member of the press so she could watch Ray up close. Well, the gym wasn’t that big, so everyone in the whole gym had an up-close view of the court. Ray started at point guard, with Heyward as the power forward and Tony as the center, even if Heyward hadn’t practiced a ton with the team yet because the football season wasn’t quite over. Jerrold got moved to small forward even though he was like 6'6" so he dwarfed the opposing small forward, and Mike had to settle for being a backup big man. Jackson even had to sit on the bench for the first quarter, because he could shoot, but he was bad for team play. Cliff was only a sophomore, but he was a good team player, and he got to start as the shooting guard, even if he wasn’t the best shooter on the team, or even the second- or third-best. Alex could tell Jackson was really cheesed off about that.
But they were playing the Rangers, one of the league basketball powers, who were supposed to clean up in the league and then go to the state playoffs, like they did last year. So it was an awesome battle. But their defense was definitely better than the Rangers’ was, and Ray stole the ball like three times in the first quarter alone, and they converted all three on fast breaks, so the Rangers had to take their hotshot guard out and put in a better dribbler who could protect the ball better.
The Rangers had a really tall center, too, so Tony and Heyward were playing a lot of double-teams on the guy to keep him from getting the ball down in the paint for easy shots. And the pressure Ray and Cliff were putting on the Rangers’ guards was doing a pretty good job of keeping them from being able to pass the ball right into the lane. Plus Ray was doing a really good job of breaking the Rangers’ man-to-man defense and getting the ball to the open man. But the Rangers’ small forward was hitting his shots from the corner, so the Rangers were still in the game.
And then in the second quarter, the coach put Jackson in and Jackson started doing what he always did, and it was bad. They had a three-point lead when Jackson went in, and they were trailing by six when the coach yanked him out just before halftime. Jackson made three shots, but he also missed five, and he wasn’t passing the ball to the open men, and he wasn’t doing any good on defense which meant the Rangers had a way easier time getting the ball to their big man when he was near the basket, so they got outscored 16-7 while Jackson was busy showboating.
So Jackson sat out the entire second half, and the team came back in the third quarter and tied it up, and then they kept doing well, and they won by three. They might have won by more than that, but the Rangers went with a ‘foul whoever has the ball’ plan to get the ball back at the end of the game. Ray made six of eight free throws down the stretch, but Cliff only hit one of six, and the coach almost had to put Jackson back in as the shooting guard. Alex didn’t tip even one shot in with her TK.
Okay, so she was tempted a couple of times, but she totally didn’t.
Everybody on their side of the gym was thrilled to death. Except Jackson, who wasn’t getting the hint. Ray was annoyed. Okay, he was really mega-cheesed off that their best shooting guard was being a pigheaded jerk so they couldn’t put him in very much. And Jackson was Ray’s friend, and still wouldn’t listen to Ray, so Ray was super frustrated about that.
Ray was so mad he didn’t even want to neck in the car.
And Alex thought Ray was a better shooting guard than Jackson anyway, even if the team totally needed Ray at point guard.
Alex sent some stills off to the newspaper and some action footage off to the TV station, just in case either one wanted to use her stuff. She wasn’t too upset if no one did … this time. She had figured out that was the way things worked in the photography biz. She mainly spent ten minutes editing video footage to send to Ray’s coach, to show to the team. Because it was obvious from where she had been filming that Jackson was sluffing off on defense and making things harder for his teammates. And it was pretty clear that most of the shots Jackson took were bad choices, with at least one teammate open when he took the shot, even if he had a defender or two in his face on pretty much every shot. And Ray looked really good. His passes looked really nice, and he did a good job of running the offense, and he only took shots when he was open or mostly open, which was probably why he made most of his shots. It wasn’t like he was the second coming of LeBron James, but he looked really hot out there.
If only Jackson wasn’t being such a jerkhead, their team would be really awesome.
* * *
Then Thursday evening, Ray came by to see her after dinner, and he told her that in basketball practice, nobody had passed the ball to Jackson in the five-on-five scrimmages. Jackson blew a gasket about it in the locker room after, but no one was happy with Jackson’s performance in what could turn out to be a really important game, and everyone made it clear that if he wasn’t going to be a team player, they weren’t going to consider him part of the team.
Ray complained, “If that doesn’t get the message across, I don’t know what will. The coach is already on his case, and he showed that sideline video that had to be from you, and boy did that make Jackson look like a dick, because there he was, not covering his man on defense, and shooting with two guys all over him and in the background everyone could see Jerrold wide open and waving his arms for the ball.”
Alex asked, “Where’s Jackson think he’s gonna go after high school?”
Ray griped, “Oh, he thinks he’s a shoo-in for UCLA or USC. Like they need another guy who can’t take directions from the coaches and thinks he can jump to the pros after one all-star season. Why?”
Alex smirked, “I was thinking about maybe misusing my superpowers.”
Ray grinned wickedly. “I gotta see this.”
She took Ray up to her room, where Shar was playing with her Terawatt Barbies. Then Alex sent an email to Colonel O’Neill, asking him if he would help her with what she wanted.
Ray laughed all the way down the stairs.
* * *
On Friday evening, before the basketball game, Ray came over to where she was looking over the lighting because it was an away game, and he gave her a huge hug. He whispered, “Jackson looked like he was gonna crap himself today at practice. Apparently, UCLA called him and told him they’d seen footage of him from Wednesday’s game when they were looking at Rangers players, and they didn’t need a self-absorbed troublemaker who couldn’t be bothered to play defense and wouldn’t pass the ball and didn’t bother to remember offensive sets, so he shouldn’t bother sending them any highlight footage. Your colonel’s pretty impressive when it comes to scheming.” He grinned. “Okay, you’re pretty impressive when it comes to scheming.”
She stood on tip-toe and kissed him. “I’ve been taking lessons from the Jack O’Neill School of Strategic Sneakiness.”
And Jackson even tried hard during the game. He had to sit out most of the first quarter, while Cliff did a so-so job as the shooting guard. But they were up by six by the time Jackson got in the game, and Alex heard Coach Eddurd warn Jackson that as soon as he started acting like he thought he was the next Allen Iverson, he was going to be warming the bench again.
So Jackson actually did what he was supposed to, for a change. The home team was a lot shorter overall, and they started going with a tight zone defense because Heyward and Tony had been killing them inside since the start of the game, and Ray gave Jackson the chance to show he’d gotten the hint. Or in his case, one of the several hundred hints that people had thrown at him. So Jackson made three of four open shots from outside, and when the guys playing zone opened it up enough to try and cover him, he passed the ball in to Tony just like he was supposed to! It was even a really great pass, and Tony got an easy layup off it. Alex wondered if that was Jackson’s first assist since maybe last January.
So then the other team switched to a box-and-one to cover Jackson all the time while keeping a zone going, and so Ray sank a couple of shots in a row from the outside. So then the other team put their best defender on Ray instead, and Ray either faked the guy out of his socks or else passed the ball to Jackson for an open shot from way outside, or else moved the ball around to Tony or Heyward or Jerrold for a short shot in traffic. And Jackson was pulling his weight on defense, too, even if Cliff was still a little better as a defensive guard and Ray was way better.
With Jackson hitting his shots from outside, and Ray hitting his, and both of them passing the ball like they were supposed to, the other team was going crazy trying to figure out how to defend against them. They went into the locker room at halftime leading by fourteen!
Then, in the third quarter, the other team went with a half-court press to keep Ray and Jackson from taking easy outside jumpshots. First, they went with a 2-2-1 half-court press, so there were two defenders up near the half-court line, and two more a way back behind them, and the last one at about the free-throw line. With Jackson doing what he was supposed to, Ray broke their press really well. Ray would come down the middle, Tony would move to a spot in front of the free throw line to tie up the defense’s back man, and the rest of the team would break. Heyward and Jerrold broke for the back corners for open jumpers, and Jackson broke for one sideline or the other for long jump shots. Then Tony would break for the paint and get the rebound if anybody missed.
After that defense didn’t work, the home team went with a 2-1-2 half-court press so they had the back corners guarded. But Ray was really great. Every time the defense tried to trap him at the half-court line with their two front players, he’d make a hard pass to Jackson or Jerrold, who were in position way off to either side of the middle defender. Then, as soon as one of the back two defenders would move up to guard the guy with the ball, he’d pass over the guy’s head to Tony or Heyward, whoever was in the back corner on the same side, and the other teammate on the back line would break for the basket, so the team would either get an open corner jumper or else a pass and a layup or else a rebound and a put-in. The other team was pretty much doomed, because Ray was a good 6'3" and still quicker than all of their guards, and all but one of their guards were under six feet. And with Ray and Jackson both playing good defense, the other team couldn’t get good passes to their back line.
They won by twenty points, and Alex got some great footage to send to the TV station. It would have been a lot more than that if the coach had wanted to run up the score, but he put Cliff and Peter in as the guards late in the game, and put Mike and Carter in as forwards, and Bryce in as the center. Bryce had been the main center last year, but that was because Tony was academically ineligible for most of last season and hurt during most of the rest of the season. But Bryce wasn’t nearly as good as Tony.
KPVC even used some of her video footage of the game that she emailed off to them, since it was an away meet and they looked awesome. Alex had her fingers crossed that she could spend a while just being ordinary Alex Mack, high school student who was getting good grades and dating a basketball star.
She got an ‘A’ on her Object Oriented Programming with C Sharp on-line course, and she made sure Mrs. Finnegan got it marked down with everything else in her scholastic record. Willow made sure Alex’s laptop was all set to start the linux systems management course, so Alex started on that, too, even if linux sounded too freaksome for words. Although they had the cutest little penguin as their logo. Anybody who had a cute penguin couldn’t be all bad. Except maybe Anita Blake, because Alex had thought the first couple of books in the series were okay, but then Anita turned into this slutty sexbomb who pretty much made Willow look like a nun, and Alex wasn’t reading them anymore. Plus, sex with vampires? EWW! Alex had seen real vampires, and they were about as sex-worthy as those giant spider babies.
Telekinesis lessons with Marsha and Shar were going really well, and Alex had switched them to a kind of air hockey game on the kitchen table, with Marsha and Shar using hockey pucks to knock a big checker around the table, and Alex used her own TK as a force field to keep the checker from falling off the edges of the table. It was pretty hard to control one thing well enough to knock something small where you wanted, so it was good practice.
The other-Willow ‘outline paper then write it super-fast then wait a week to edit it’ plan was going great. She had ‘A’s on all but one of her English papers and on both of her Spanish papers, even though she hadn’t thought she could write a paper in Spanish until she tried it. And calculus was going great, because between reading ahead and hearing Mrs. McGurty explain stuff, Alex was understanding it and getting all the homework right. And chem was going great, even if Wade was starting to worry out loud that she was going to have a higher first term grade than he would. She didn’t see why he cared, as long as he got an ‘A’. But he did. Boys could be totally weird.
And speaking of boys, she really didn’t want to hear about Azure Crush and her naked blue body, but the December issue of a certain filthy magazine was already out, and selling like hotcakes, or maybe really filthy hotcakes with naughty pictures drawn on the tops. And boys were talking about it like all the time. She just hoped Ray wasn’t talking about it in the locker room with the other basketball players, because she had no hope that the other basketball players weren’t talking about it. At least the only thing Louis said about it in her hearing was about the business side of it, because even with five million bucks going into Azure Crush’s bank account and money going for that Azure Crush legal team, Larry Flynt was making a big profit.
And Az was happy being at that mansion, so Alex couldn’t even be upset about that. And boy was she not going to ever mention to Willow that Didi the Centerfold was bisexual, even if Jack probably had guy fantasies about coming home and finding Willow and a big-boobed blonde centerfold bimbo waiting for him. She already knew Willow had some fantasies like that, and that was TMI even before Willow started making with the imaginary details. Eww.
So her classes were going great, and things with Ray were going great, and things with Shar were going great, and with Jackson trying to be Magic Johnson instead of Allen Iverson, the basketball team was doing mega-great. Even the lessons with Jo Lupo were going great, and her dad and mom bought an exercise bike and rode it while they watched TV, so they could get in shape for kung fu. And she was regularly selling video footage of the basketball games to KPVC and stills to the Gazette. Everything was going perfectly.
She figured that meant mega-bad stuff was lurking around the next corner.
* * *
Jack O’Neill was doing paperwork again. There was nothing good about paperwork. What was the point of the electronic workplace if they had a million pages of paperwork dumped on top of it? He’d known the ‘paperless office’ was going to be a joke as soon as he saw that every single computer they’d rolled out way back then had a big honking printer hooked up to it. Some of them had special printers, so you could try to type on fancy forms … and fail miserably a dozen times in a row so your desk wasn’t paperless and you also had an overflowing trash can, too, plus you needed to buy more forms.
He had paperwork he had to turn in every week and every month and every quarter, and paperwork he had to turn in after every op, and paperwork he had to turn in after every update, and paperwork he had to turn in on every person under his command, and even more paperwork on top of all that. It was a conspiracy by the paper companies!
Well, that was his story and he was sticking to it.
Just as bad, there was all this paperwork he had to read, and initial, and maybe even take action on. Every one of his teams was turning in regular reports. Every one of his team leaders was turning in reports on their people. Walter turned in reports like there was no tomorrow: the guy was a report-generating machine. One of the best things about Alex was she didn’t turn in weekly reports on her team. Even if she did have to turn in a report after every op. He even read through them really carefully, because he was dragging an eighteen-year-old girl into horrible situations, and he deserved as much painful payback as possible for that. And sometimes she had useful views or ideas or comments. Now Finn wrote really detailed, dense reports that were chock full of important stuff, and Miller wasn’t far behind. The problem was that Gates was the only one of them who ever snuck anything amusing into the written reports.
He was still trying to get Finn and Miller promoted again, even if it hadn’t been six months since their last promotions. Gates deserved to get promoted, too. And Lupo needed to get bumped from first louie up to captain. Miller was doing a great job with her. If only Hammond could get a four-star to cut a couple of promotions loose, and enough people to form two more SRI teams. After all, the SRI was the only military group in the country that was on a wartime footing right now, and his people deserved to be promoted and awarded medals just like soldiers in any other war. More so, since nobody else in history ever had to engage in tac ops against five hundred hungry giant spiders or a giant man-eating blob.
Man, you could not get a guy enough medals for valor when he had hunted down and fought a giant, carnivorous, unstoppable blob with nothing but a fire extinguisher and a bottle of bleach.
At least that Watanabe guy had gotten the Japanese to give Team Two some medals for that ‘silicate’ op. They all deserved it. Jack still thought the Russians were being chintzy weasels on medals for Gates and his men and the other teams, especially after the SRI had pulled a lot of Russian asses out of the fire a dozen times. What did the Russians think the area around that Siberian forest and that radioactive lake and Chernobyl and those other spots would look like now if it wasn’t for the SRI? He made a mental note to ask Gates what the Russian was for ‘cheap medal-hoarding bastards’. Just in case he got to work it into a conversation someday.
Meanwhile, Jack was working his way through a stack of ‘eyes only’ reports that really needed to be disseminated a hell of a lot more widely than the report authors wanted. Really, if you were going to spend a few million bucks and integrate everything anybody knew about North Korea to make an important white paper, you ought to have a list of five thousand people who would get to read the damn thing. Instead, the CIA was guarding these things like the Batman was going to glide in and beat the crap out of them if anyone even saw the front cover. Jack was pretty sure George wasn’t really supposed to be showing some of these reports to him, either, but Hammond was a lot more concerned about protecting America and the planet than he was about keeping a dozen CIA suits happy with him. From the cover letters, Jack was guessing that Samuel Daystrom dork was still pissed off about how Jack’s team had handled the whole Marissa Weigler op, and was trying to throw his weight around to dish out a little payback. The guy had no idea he was up against a skilled political fighter like George Hammond, who was way outside this little palooka’s weight class.
Jack didn’t particularly worry about the readers of his reports, because he and Walter made sure there was nothing in there that would identify anyone other than one Jack O’Neill, whose name was already on the thing. No one was going to ID Riley Finn or Graham Miller or anyone just from the reports Jack released, and then go after them or their loved ones. No one was going to ID Terawatt, other than to know she was saving their asses once again. And the more people who realized ‘Wacky Maggie’ Walsh was a threat to everyone on the planet, the better.
Meanwhile, this damn report on the North Koreans was going nowhere fast. He had to get out a detail map of North Korea and draw arrows on it to show what the hell these guys thought was going on. Okay, massive troop movements … but they were going in no particular direction. Paramilitary forces were getting moved around in what looked like a big wiggly loop as far as he could gauge. Neither of those made any sense whatsoever. Were they just trying to scare the shit out of the South Koreans? Well, that part was working great, because Seoul was pretty much one giant clamped-shut sphincter these days. But the imports on food were suddenly way down. Since the imported food went primarily to keeping the military and paramilitary forces fed, no one knew what the hell was up with that. Had they successfully grown giant invertebrates using Deemer’s mad science approach, and now they were eating the stuff? “Mmm, giant radium-flavored cockroaches! Now there’s good eatin’!” He really wondered what eating that crap would do to a person. Was there any chance they were about to have an explosion of mutant caveman-looking soldiers? On the upside, any mutant caveman soldiers who ended up looking like Dr. Deemer’s assistant wouldn’t be able to operate a rifle or even get their finger inside a trigger guard.
He initialed the report, and then spent five minutes typing an email to Hammond on what it might mean to the SRI, and his thoughts on who in Russia, China, South Korea, and Japan ought to be given a heads-up.
A report on what they still didn’t know about the Lanzhou situation. Great. A hundred eighty pages of ‘I got nothing, you got anything?’ He read the entire thing, just in case there was the slightest hint of anything he didn’t already know. All he got out of it was there were probably hideous riots downstream, from the millions of people who needed the water from the river and were being ordered not to drink it. Even if every city’s water treatment plant was suddenly useless, surely they could boil the water and make it potable, or distill it and have potable water from that. Even solar stills would do for that, and you could make one of those with a sheet of clear plastic and a can and some rocks. The Chinese weren’t stupid, and they were bigger on the brute-force way of coping than most first-world countries, so there had to be something about that water that they were freaking out about. Was there something alive and carnivorous in it? That wouldn’t be good for anyone near that river, and eventually that river would empty into the Pacific Ocean.
A huge, mainly-useless report on the silicates. Someone really, really way smarter than the report authors designed the things and snuck the design past those cancer researchers, and the report authors were sucking their thumbs that they didn’t fully understand how someone — someone undoubtedly named Maggie — did it. Plus tons of annoying appendices slapped on by other people who weren’t happy with the main report. Oh, wait! Something useful in appendix XVII: details on how to prevent more of them, and how to kill any new ones. And it was by a three-person EU team that included Terawatt’s little BFF Hermione. He was still thanking that other Jack O’Neill from that other dimension for saving the multiverse and for making Alex think this world’s Jack O’Neill might be a pretty okay guy. Was it wrong to be thanking yourself? And so he had Terawatt regularly saving the asses of everyone on the planet, and a luscious, brilliant, amazing, sexy girlfriend who was way too good for him. He blamed Cordelia Chase for that, because if Willow hadn’t had every bit of self-esteem beaten out of her as a kid, she wouldn’t be settling for a goofy old soldier like him. If he ever had to go to Rio de Janeiro on SRI business, he was going to find a way to track down Ms. Chase and let her know what a disgusting piece of shit she was.
And finally, something useful. A report from the Russians to some guys in the State Department who weren’t afraid to share something. A useful Russian report? State Department weenies who weren’t afraid to share? That was crazy. Next, someone would be telling him there was a woman who could fly and hurl lightning. Granted, some of these Russian cops were pretty damn impressive, especially considering who they were up against some of the time. A couple of smart investigators tracked down the people they thought could be the submarine thieves. Based on the evidence their team had assembled, they suspected a team of at least ten men who included all the usual suspects over there: some gunrunners, some mobsters, some ex-KGB problems, and in this case, some former submariners who had been pensioned off when they didn’t want to leave the submarine service. And, naturally with the Russian mob involved, there was the expected big crew of heavily-armed minions. All of them were extremely dead. The investigators spent some time studying the crime scenes in and around this warehouse complex where the badguys had gotten together for some reason, and they concluded that the suspects all just shot each other or knifed each other or killed each other with anything handy, which apparently included some farming implements and a chainsaw. Ugh. Or as Alex would have said, ‘eww eww eww!’
Wait a minute. All of them? All at the same time? They all just went psycho simultaneously?
Oh, crap.
Jack re-read that section. Twice. Then he went back through the document until he found someone he could call. And that someone called someone else, who called someone else. It took four aggravating hours to get through to one of the actual investigators, and fortunately that guy spoke English, because Jack’s Russian was just on this side of humiliating. Since Jack was just some fancy-pants American military guy, he was expecting to get the runaround, but apparently someone had heard about the SRI, so he got put through to Police Captain Kolokoltsev, who was heading the investigation. And the guy was cooperative.
After the captain explained about the policework they had done, and the disaster they had found at the warehouse complex, Jack carefully asked, “So it looked like they just all went crazy at the same time?”
The captain said, “Yes, it does look very much like that. It is very puzzling.” He cursed in a few colorful Russian phrases that made Jack chortle. That apparently helped, since it marked Jack as someone who spoke something other than American.
Jack suggested, “I think you want to get a CBW team in there to get samples. Air, dust, water, foods and drinks, blood, everything you can sample and analyze. And we can help with the analysis on anything you can’t do, or you can’t afford to do.”
The captain suspiciously asked, “What do you know that we do not?”
Jack answered a question with a question. “How much do you know about what happened to Beirut?”
The captain proceeded to drop another half dozen colorful Russian phrases, at least two of which Jack had never heard before. Not even from Gates.